American Currents: Raking Leaves and Revolution

I ran into an acquaintance Thursday afternoon, the day my picture appeared in the local paper raking leaves at the Occupy Portland camp site Wednesday morning.

It had been 31 days since the police evicted the campers, and 31 days that the squares had been fenced off so that no one -- neither the Occupiers nor the general public -- could take a step into those downtown blocks.

The City Parks and Recreation Department had originally planned to let volunteers onto the site to rake leaves on Nov. 23, only 10 days after “eviction,” but recent rains had made the job much less feasible and appetizing, so the job was postponed.

Good thing it was; Portland had pretty much no rain the first two weeks of December, so by this last Wednesday the ground and dead foliage were pretty dry and manageable. Poetically, a light rain finally fell Wednesday evening, hours after we finished.

It took just three and a half hours to clear the 1.84 acres of two city blocks. Carole and I worked from 9:30 to about noon, then decided to quit so other folks would still have something to do.

There’s not much to describe. Roughly 20 volunteers were on site at any given time, using rakes and pitchforks to place piles of dry leaves into tarps and then dragging or carrying the loads over to City vehicles to dump them in the truck beds. I recognized several people from Occupy Portland camp days, including a member of the Media Committee who had brought his laptop and a Webcam on a tripod to record and report on the cleanup. Others were wearing Occupy buttons or insignia, but most of us were just plain older folks.

Maybe half a dozen Parks employees were also at the site to hand out equipment, bananas, and coffee, wield diesel blowers to clear the leaves from the fences and bushes, and operate the trucks.

But back to my acquaintance and what he had to say the next day. He had been reading my Facebook posts and commentaries on Occupy Portland over the past few months, and he said he wondered why so many people had gotten so ostensibly upset about the camp in the park. “I wasn’t much inconvenienced by it,” he said. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience for anybody, was his implication.

I’ve been thinking about that, I told him. I think the carping about Occupy Portland and Occupy Wall Street -- you know, all the people who have said, “I support what they stand for, but they’re going about it all wrong” or “they don’t have a plan” -- is a reflection of how huge and frightening the issues they’ve raised are.

It’s like death . . . like trying to comprehend your own mortality. It’s so big and inevitable and frightening that you don’t want to look at it, so you deny it, deflect your fears into horror movies and spiritualism, or distract yourself entirely with goodies and entertainment.

The societal problems the kids of Occupy Wall Street are shoving in our face seem so huge and unfathomably complex, the financial and government forces arrayed against us little people are so wealthy and powerful, that we don’t think we can do anything about them, and we look for any excuse not to have to deal with them.

Picking at Occupy Wall Street tactics, complaining about “the damage to our parks,” and buying into the lies we’ve been told by the police, the media, and (if you’re inclined to listen to them) demogogues like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, are all ways of refusing to face the huge mess this country has gotten itself into. We’re desperate for excuses not to have to do the hard work and heavy lifting it’s gonna take to fix our ailing polity.

For me, Occupy Wall Street sent a message that I have not been doing my job as a citizen. I didn’t fight hard enough against sending our soldiers off to foreign wars, even though I knew from the start they would be costly and wouldn’t accomplish a damn thing.

I didn’t protest loudly to my Congressional delegation that they were making a big mistake (or at least failing to represent my views) when they passed the so-called Patriot Act, killed the public option for health care insurance, behaved as if big banks that couldn’t manage their money should get a government handout but individual homeowners and college students should not, and so many other things. I thought if I just took care of myself, these big awful things would just go away.

Well they haven’t. Many of these wrong moves have hurt us, and hurt our fellow Americans. The wars have wasted beautiful young American lives, the economic shenanigans have thrown people on the street, loaded kids down with tremendous debt (so they’re forced to take high-paying jobs that support the status quo, in business, law, and marketing, rather than work that pleases their soul, like art and social work and environmental activism).

We need to stop picking at zits when our limbs are bleeding. If Occupy Portland or Occupy Wall Street irritates you, forget about them . . . but don’t forget about the issues they’ve raised.

As I said before, camps and marches aren’t going to accomplish anything by themselves. They never were intended to. They merely served as a tocsin, the clarion call that says: “Wake up, America! Get to work on fixing at least some of the things that have gone wrong here. Don’t worry so much about what other folks are doing, unless you feel you can work with them; just do what you can, or find the people you think you can work with to get the job(s) done.”

Tackle the big things or small, when you can. It could be as small as raking some leaves in your local park.

* * * * * *

It looks as if at least part of the Occupy movement is starting to coalesce seriously around the legislative and legal challenge to corporate personhood. Forces are gearing up to make this a big issue in 2012. Here’s an excerpt about the background history to the legal notion that “a corporation is equal to a human being” from Corporations Are Not People, the book by Jeffrey Clements, former assistant attorney general of Massachusetts and co-founder of Free Speech for People.

If you disagree with the proposition that thousands of corporate lobbying dollars is “free speech” equal to the voice of any individual American, then you should join the effort to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Here’s a rundown of various citizen efforts and inside-the-Beltway proposals so far. Look further into them, if they interest you, and communicate your opinions and desires to your Congresspeople. They’re likely to count your single voice as expressing the opinion of hundreds of other constituents. That’s power. Use it!

USEFUL LINKS

A former mortgage underwriter for Wells Fargo Bank who blew the whistle on the process explains how she lost her job trying to do it right

Patrick Meighan, a writer for the Fox TV sitcom "Family Guy," describes what he saw and experienced during the Los Angeles Police Department eviction

A United Nations envoy asserts that the United States is not protecting the rights of Occupy protesters

PBS commentator Sal Gentile lists five signs that the U.S. is becoming more like a police state

And, just for fun, a story about elderly Chinese citizens OCCUPYING IKEA!