Last evening, I was in San Francisco, helping out at a Christmas performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and wandered briefly amongst buildings lit against the darkest days of the year and thought happily of the coming of the light. December is a difficult month for me. The increasing dark drains me; the shopping frenzy alarms me. Sometimes I just hibernate.

Last night, I left Oakland just as the sun was setting and arrived in San Francisco minutes later in the deep dark. Boarding the train, I was unable to find a seat and stood near the door next to two taciturn police officers, one of whom nervously checked his watch. Two more stood at the far door of the car. I suppose their presence on the train was supposed to reassure shoppers bound for Market Street, but I was not soothed by the sight of unsmiling men in uniform with guns and tasers strapped to their waists. For a moment, I felt as if I could not breathe.

Exiting the train, I felt so disoriented, so anxious for fresh air, I turned and walked away from my destination and very nearly bumped into a trailer parked on Market St to serve as temporary police station, also meant, I'm sure, to be reassuring but for me unsettling. I find it disturbing there needs to be such a visible and determined police presence. It is, I suppose, indicative of a creeping dis-ease within our society -- both an admission of the increasingly wide gulf between those who have the resources to shop at Nordstrom's or Macy's and a sign of the rising fear that those who don't have will attack those who do have because they, too, want to have. All this emphasis on consumerism has sickened our society. I think of what Ericka Huggins said recently, and I quote loosely, We need to remember we are citizens not consumers. As citizens we care about community and each other; we can open our hearts and be generous. As consumers, we give in to desire and greed.

As shoppers passed by, jovially jostling one another, I looked upward to the sky made blacker deeper darker by the wonderful lights painting with bold strokes color onto the buildings below.  I felt grateful for the gift of the light. It was enough to breathe that color, a more delicate and succulent food than any buttery pastry, any savory tart and far more valuable than a diamond encrusted watch.

_I am not an angel, and as it turns out, I'm far too solitary to be an effective social activist, but I do what I can. I don't shop; I don't steal. I approach my world honestly and with open eyes. I have given up thinking my ship will "arrive"; I am content to let it sail, and if it wrecks on some rocky barren shore, ends as rooted to the earth as this one is, that's okay. If I am marooned, I can walk through my world, acting, I hope, with compassion, grace, and kindness. On this night, there is enough light to fill my heart. Tomorrow, the sun creeps back.

It will take longer for the return of leaves , but on this night trees are washed with ice blue light and the tiled ground below swept to green with flood lights that transform the dark. We have our nighttime sun above, a glowing orange-lit window dancing with its rays of darker red,  but soon soon  the noonday sun will  grow warmer and brighter and fuller as the season turns. There will be blooming hillsides soon enough.

For now, we must content ourselves with flowers of light, bursting into bloom on pine boughs, barren branches, and sometimes on street cars. This passing bus was peculiarly empty of passengers but nonetheless smiling and cheerful as it laughed its way down the street, avoiding any turmoil.

A patient being.

_But not all vehicles festooned  with lights are cheerful reminders of a season of giving. Just before leaving Oakland, vehicles with flashing lights, non-celebratory lights, parked quietly in front of my house. A man who had been volunteering for WSWA on the corner suffered a seizure, and emergency personnel  arrived promptly, which was great, but what followed was not as wonderful

_
The neighborhood thugs reared up, acting with a grim meanness that was both cruel and unnecessary.
As the firemen put away their life-saving tools and as the paramedics removed the man to the waiting ambulance, kids in cars decided to assert their authority, confronting the emergency workers by careening at high speeds in the near-by intersection, leaving circular tracks of burned rubber on the pavement.

Thick black smoke engulfed the fire truck and covered the emergency personnel as they quickened their pace, trying to hoist the man into the ambulance before his troubles were made worse by the toxic smoke. That heavy oily smoke lingered for many minutes, settling on trees and flowers, smearing windows and seeping into lungs. Eventually it blew away, but the toxicity of the insensitivity and inherent cruelty demonstrated by these 'doughnutters' cannot be as easily dissipated. They meant the mark left on the street – black circles seared into the pavement created as emergency lights flashed – as a challenge to authority but instead it served us all as a reminder of the loss of heart that is more and more evident in our daily lives. It was an act of violence not of innocence, violence directed not towards individuals but toward the community, their own community. That these kids would choose to pollute the air at a time of great need, when a life hung so precariously in the balance, is both pathetic, shocking, and profoundly sad. 

I hope for the end to this senseless  violence. I await the return of the light.

On the morning following the sudden and senseless gun battle in West Oakland that left eight people, including three children, wounded by bullets, a thick grey fog rolled in, obliterating any horizon line and settling all edges. As I walked through that morning fog, all the sea disappeared into sky. I did not despair its leaving. I was grateful for  the gentle grey erasing all distance and providing an evenness that returned small things, like rocks and tiny shorebirds, to a distinct and welcomed clarity. I needed the specificity and I also wanted world to wrap me, hold me, and hoped for the sky to descend, offer new breath welcoming and close. The fog did just that.

As I walked, I looked into the strange completeness of the fog and thought about the woman and baby not yet two years old lying in critical condition in separate hospitals; the baby with a gunshot wound to his head. He may not recover, but we are all hoping he will. The helplessness of that left me breathless, gasping in great draughts of fog and sea air.  I thought about the young men acting badly, firing guns repeatedly and thoughtlessly at a peaceful crowd of men, women, and children, and the wrongness of that forced me to exhale, rapidly. I leaned down, picked up a small stone, and hurled it as far as I could into the bay. I heard it splash but I never saw it fall.

The fog ate it.

We so frequently say of those who are lost, those who have strayed to violence, that their brains are foggy, they  are lost in a fog, but I think it might be more accurate to say that their hearts and minds are polluted by decay and misery, made heavy by hate. They are overwhelmed by smog rather than fog. Fog heals; fog nurtures flowers, feeds moss and grass. Smog eats metal, soils glass, corrodes plastics, causes cancers in hearts and minds.

When seabirds swim in oily seas, their wings grow heavy and they can no longer fly. When young men live congested lives, surrounded by violence and decay, that pollution sticks to their skin as readily as crude oil clings to feathers.  That's the oily smog that collapses their hearts and steals their breath, keeps them attached to hard metal violence, loving guns rather than flesh.

I wonder, longingly and stupidly perhaps, if those gun-toting maniacs were to walk instead in blue morning fog,  feel its breath, hear the splintered cries of seabirds, could they  feel the weight and grace of innocence?  Could they give up their guns?

The earth heals in ways beyond analysis. I know this not only because I walk daily near salt water, passing under great trees and skies alive with birds, but because I have memories of other years spent in other inner cities almost as violent as Oakland.

When my sons were small, we lived in South Brooklyn, where there were many suffering from smoggy brains and collapsed hearts, where streets were littered with trash, crack vials and discarded needles, and  nights were bursting with gunfire.

Sometimes, when the surrounding violence and decay became too sharp to bear, we would leave town for a day, drive north to still wild woods of High Tor, park our car behind some bush and walk along the narrow  and overgrown path that zigged and zagged under trees to the bald granite mountaintop. Then, we could stand tall, look up to clouds, down to  freight trains, the size of toys, chugging along the riverbank below as  equally small sailboats flew across the wide belly of the Hudson river, imagine the trains with steam engines pulling carloads of pioneers and the sailboats as ocean going schooners tacking across a current, pulling them out to sea. Standing there in the wind, staring across miles, we remembered how to dream, and when we returned to the inner city, we carried with us bits of the forest -- colored leaves, flowers, rocks -- and gathered bits of our imagined dreams.

If we could imagine sailboats as schooners, turn diesel train engines into black-throated beauties billowing steam, we could  certainly  imagine worlds without war, days without guns, mornings rich with laughter, night warm with love. Those days on the mountain gave us  back our hearts, revived our faith in our own ability to imagine better worlds.

A healthy society is one that celebrates and encourages imagination, and when winter arrives, we need our imagination more than ever. When light disappears into foggy dawns and dusky afternoons, we may be left with leafless trees and shadowless shores, but if we close our eyes and dream, that dreaming can pin leaves on branches, refill the skies with light. It may sound corny but when the season is at its darkest, when life seems dismal, when unhappiness overwhelms, we can imagine  the return of the light, replace shadow with sparkle, encourage joy. If we are what we think, if we imagine our future, I want to think peace, imagine a world without guns.

BANISH  HANDGUNS.

Another shooting yesterday. This one at the Haas school of Business on the UC-Berkeley campus. And then at the other end of the day, a friend who was involved in a serious car accident learns from a cop in a passing patrol car that stops only briefly that neither he nor any other policeman has the time to make a report. Not now. Too much else going on to pay attention to traffic accidents. Exchange information, call the station tomorrow or file a report online. He has to shout to be heard over the barking  of a very large Alsatian shepherd who leaps against the mesh-covered open window of the back seat. No assistance from the police but the tow-truck driver who arrives shortly thereafter is kind. Despite the violence, despite the tensions, always there is kindness.

I go for a long walk in the park and watch the autumn leaves falling and think about the nearly 200 emergency calls that have gone unanswered in recent days. I think of my friend sitting alone, shaking, her car totaled.

More than leaves are turning rusty red, falling, and blowing into dusty piles. All those neat little hinges holding society together, keeping things flexible, are freezing or flaking, and the doors are falling off their jambs.

But still there is beauty, and beauty lets me breathe.  I walk and snap pictures of rosy leaves, but when I see the photos, I think of Wim Wenders' 1974  film Alice in the Cities, a moving film about human kindness, the kindness of strangers. A journalist suffering from writing block stops jotting notes and starts to snap Polaroid photos. As he watches a photo develop, he says that the picture can't show what he sees. I feel the same when I look at my photos. I can't capture the wide sweep of the sky, the inexplicable brilliance of the leaves gone suddenly red or orange, the pungent aroma of oak leaves already on the ground.

I can, however, step outside into gold sun and walk past the curtains of ruby red grape leaves, through piles of drying leaves. I can get lost in all that -- for a while anyway. The sound of crunching leaves underfoot erases memories of sudden gunfire. The smells of damp earth and new decay recall other autumns elsewhere when whole mountains went overnight from placid green to fancy dress, looking suddenly  like harlequins patched red and gold.

As children, we would rake up huge piles of leaves, great masses of color, and then fall on those piles, always thinking that the leaves would catch us, support us as a pillow might but always we were surprised when the hard ground caught us first. But no matter. We  came up laughing, bright leaves in our hair and sprouting from sweaters, jackets, jeans and then danced about like living breathing laughing trees. Such happiness is necessary as days grow shorter and winds colder.

As winter arrives and cities grow ever more explosive, as confrontations increase, as folks cover their faces with bandanas and scream at strangers, I want to know why, of course. I want to think of potential solutions, of course, but I also want to see the beauties of the world and know the grace of human kindness. I don't necessarily want to depend on the kindness of strangers, but I want to know of its existence, to feel it as beauty. To hear the music of beauty of the natural world, beauty in human life, is to feel kindness, to taste grace. If the world as we know it is to end, I want  to be sitting at the edge of the sea, my arms open to sun and sky, welcoming beauty into my heart.

 From Wordsworth  Tintern Abbey:

            These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

In the past week, Oakland police working with US Marshals  have arrested more than 130 suspected killers, thieves, drug dealers, and sex offenders. The sweep was announced as a valiant effort to make Oakland streets safe once again, and then late yesterday afternoon, yet another young black man was shot to death, this time near Occupy: Oakland.

Although most accounts of the shooting state that neither victim nor shooter were denizens of the encampment, immediately blame for the shooting was shifted onto the Occupiers,  and now many are once again calling for the dismantlement of the camp.
I know that after the shooting the first responder was a compassionate and skilled medic from the camp, but I also know that some of the response was chaotic and less than compassionate.

Watching videos of the aftermath of the shooting that are now floating about the web, I am inclined to agree that serious Occupy organizers should perhaps reassess strategy, dismantle the camp, get that office that they want, and start organizing beyond daily living. On one video, a young woman can be heard crying out That's a dummy on the ground. They are resuscitating a dummy. On another, a man can be heard shouting Undercover cop, that's an undercover cop. . . Both seem to be  exhibiting paranoia out of control . . .  that was not a dummy on the ground. No one was trying to manufacture an incident to shut down the encampment. The limp body on the ground was that of a young man, maybe twenty years old, bleeding out, a young man shot in the back of his head, a young man, dead. A young man killed in cold blood not by cops but by his "friends" after an argument that some say was over a bag of weed.

The shooting may not be related to Occupy: Oakland, but with comments like that, those particular Occupiers who shouted out such things identified themselves as being perhaps dangerously out of touch with their hearts and minds. Of course, those two are not the all, but . . .

*Occupy your Mind.*
*Think and act Responsibly.*

I recall words that Dostoevsky wrote in a letter more than a century ago: The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile. Confined to a prison in most abominable circumstances, Dostoevsky was writing about himself.  He recognized that the filth that surrounded him, the poor living conditions, the cold, the lack of food, were souring his spirit and confusing his mind.

It seems as if the Occupy encampment may be becoming a prison of sort. Rather than empowering its denizens, convincing them that they are the 99% -- the majority --  the camp is creating dangerous estrangement. Many are feeling increasingly separated from the surrounding community regardless of the obvious fact that the surrounding community is their community, our community, the community of the 99%. If you really believe yourself to be part of the 99%, to view the greater world as the enemy is a mistake. It's a troubled world, needing repair and much revision, but it is our world.

We should not voluntarily imprison ourselves but seek instead  ways to open our lives to beauty and love. 

Obviously, some do. Signs have been posted beseeching campers to patronize local businesses and to respect those who visit, but not all extend welcome to visitors. Not all listen. Some are more interested in aggressively pushing back, and those few are edging to the forefront, blotting out the many who want peaceful resolution.

Early this morning, even I, definitely one of that 99%, was challenged by some rather aggressive characters lounging about the perimeter of the camp, accused of being a cop,  because I was asking questions and taking pictures, documenting the  camp in the falling rain.

I don't look much like  a cop. Don't even own a baseball cap.

Once again, I find myself with my eyes closed, hoping for peace, wanting to believe that we can create and maintain a world founded on love, mutual respect, peace and justice.

I love this world, and I love life.

My heart goes out to the family of the young man shot to death.

On strange still mornings when the air is crisply clear, the world turns upside down. Here, Oakland's corporate towers, wavering on their watery foundations.

The Legacy of Pirates

A boy gets shot, doesn’t even make the news.
That’s how bad things are. He didn’t die, so
no one needs to know except those who know,
those who watched the men in blue, bemused
and on their knees, brushing detail from the street,
those who saw the yellow bands of tape, stretched
from the wrought iron fence beside the church
to the public school gate. Church and State meet
as police set metal moons to orbit
the two square yards between cars where the boy
fell. They work in silence. The only noise
the click of cameras, taking pictures
no one sees. Today, I put some tinned fish
and crackers into a bag, drove to the beach
with my dog who knows nothing of guns,
who ran and ran until all four feet left
the ground. That flight could be so easy
made me laugh, grateful for the earth
the sea the sky the sun the speed the blue.
Now I’m home, drinking mint tea with honey,
listening to the radio: homeland security strategy
death threat espionage war guns battle theft.
My dog is deep asleep, his head on my feet,
caught up no doubt in grey seabirds, white flash
up and up and up, blinking into all that blue
as he  madly charges into the sky, legs folded
to his belly, resting on air, but wingless, he falls
to earth and barks. We saw elk, he and I,
babies, brand-new, grazing near the lighthouse.
We sat inside the car, its motor growling
but they didn’t sprint long-legged up the slope.
They shifted aside, looked with tender eyes,
stepped before us with gracious dignity.
Fearless. No men with guns. No enemies.
Down below the cliffs, sea lions on the beach
just up from the sea. One still slicky wet, was singing.

Yesterday's rain has passed, and the sky is washed clean. Air smells of damp earth and newness. The clocks are shifted, an hour gained. I enjoy that hour walking about the mostly quiet streets of West Oakland. St. Patrick's has its doors thrown open, and music  spills down the steps, voices singing words I cannot understand. It makes me happy just to hear the song.

And then, I turn the corner and discover a pile of trash dumped on the still blooming garden, the beautiful garden planted in the narrow strip of land between the sidewalk and the street.

Two things make this spillage unusual. First the trash has not been dumped at a corner (the more ordinary place for illegal dumping) and second, the objects dumped are not various. Everything dumped here belongs in the life of a small child. A child-sized mattress, wrapped in plastic, lies in the street. A deflated wading pool, neatly rolled, spills from a plastic bucket. A battery-operated motorcycle, minus its front wheel, is on its side on the dirt.

And on the other side of the blooming Scotch Broom,  a very clean white teddy bear is face down in the dirt, spilled from a laundry basket that still contains a DVD player and two soggy Disney movie DVDs. I am sobered by this sight, made sad. The dump hints at loss, unspeakable miserable sorrowful.

Who threw away these small pieces of a small life and why? That someone would heave these objects atop of blooming flowers suggests either great anger or great sorrow.

Cover the beauty with great pain.

UPDATE: One hour after taking these pictures, while church members were still inside praying, a 14-year-old was shot maybe twenty feet from the teddy bear with its face to the ground. The block where I walked this morning is now cordoned off with yellow tape, stretching from the chain-link fence outside the school to the wrought iron fence of the church.

OUTLAW HANDGUNS.

Democritus said It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new,  and that may be true, but gods often languish in far off regions while confused humans wander the earth. Sadly, last night the peaceful protesters, those who insisted on thinking something beautiful something new, went home and those bent on mayhem took over. A small band of mostly young men, faces hidden, identities masked, rampaged around downtown, breaking windows, lighting fires, and making a general mess for someone else to pick up. The small business owners downtown don’t deserve that. It is hard enough to run a business on a small profit margin without having to suddenly spend hundreds of dollars replacing windows, repainting walls, picking up someone else’s mess. This morning the helicopters returned. By 6 a.m. they were buzzing about, and I had to close the window to shut out the noise. By afternoon, rain and peace.

Last night someone spray painted this on a wall downtown:

Until the last capitalist is hung by the entrails of the last bureaucrat.

Really? Who shall we describe as a capitalist? The elderly couple living on the husband’s pension, money that arrives every month because other money has been invested and yields monthly dividends? Oops, yes, their income, money that pays their rent and buys them the small amount of food they can afford, is a result of, gulp, capitalism. And if that money goes away? Are you ready to step up to the plate and pay that rent, buy that food? And who exactly is a bureaucrat? The man who works overtime downtown, putting in longer hours than he is paid for, shuffling papers so that low-income folks can get housing? Yes, he serves as a bureaucrat. Are you going to slice his guts, make sure that no one is housed? There are good capitalists, bad capitalists, communists who really do share, communists who could care less about others, bureaucrats who work for the greater good, and those who rob the bank. Nothing, nothing, can be explained by simple dualism. It's all shaded and resonant, conf

Slogans are slogans, often too simplistic to have much meaning. That particular slogan blasted thoughtlessly onto a wall makes it rather clear those midnight marauders are not interested in REAL change; they want instead to stop change, to stay well away from potential solution.

Sadly, these provocateurs, more interested in shutting the movement down, may have recruited some fuzzy thinkers from within the movement to do their dirty work, convinced these  confused yet  rightfully angry young people that violence is necessary. Worse yet, the provocateurs, whoever they are, will (no doubt) be shielded; the fuzzy thinkers unmasked.

Come on, people, Occupy your mind, Think Responsibly.  We want change, not wholesale destruction. We need to care for one another.

Yesterday's thousands of protesters were incredibly peaceful, determined, well-informed, and respectful of each other and of the property of all small business owners downtown. They were courageous. The small handful of violent self-declared 'anarchists' who came out after dark wearing masks were cowards or employed by those who want desperately to discredit the Occupy movement, to continue the status quo.

This morning, the legitimate Occupy protesters were back on the streets scrubbing out negative slogans, cleaning up the messes left by agitators. The ILWU invited protesters who had slept at the Port to breakfast and expressed support for what they have been saying and working for . . . Except for a few, most understand the violence as a separate issue, quite unrelated to those ideas and suggestions posited by the majority of the peaceful demonstrators.

Power to the people.

A million workers working for nothing
You better give 'em what they really own
We got to put you down
When we come into town

 *** True, true, but How? By . . .***

Singing power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on

Speak clearly, demonstrate peaceably, ignore the provocateurs, or better yet . . . find out who hired them to wreak mayhem.

Thank you Gandhi.
Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thank you John Lennon.

Peace.

Thank you, Jon Stewart, for your wonderful Wednesday night commentary about the police raid of Occupy: Oakland.

(Video temporarily available at: http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_19206202)

Your humor has made the brutality of this action evident to all Americans.  For those who still have questions about the intensity of this action, where police out-numbered protesters maybe 3:1, watch this raw video of the raid prior to the explosive scene featured on the Jon Stewart show. That happened later in the evening after the hordes of police had trampled through the plaza, leveling everything in their path, leaving  in their wake a mass of sleeping bags, destroyed tents, and emptied food bins.

Warning. On this video you will hear much swearing, see reporters being shoved aside and public servants trampling over those whom they are sworn to protect:

Ninety homicides in Oakland this year, and the ninetieth happened this morning right before 11 a.m. on the next block. The sun was shining brightly; the air was crisp and clean. A small flock of ten warblers flitted about the lower branches of the great oak tree in front of the community center. Two butterflies, resting on the deep red chrysanthemum that had burst into bloom only two days ago, opened and closed their wings. A white cabbage butterfly crossed paths with  a tiny skipper, and both flew suddenly upwards. Squirrels ran on the telephone wires.

The street had been washed clean by yesterday's rain, but Friday is garbage day. Folks were pushing trash cans and recycling bins out to the curb, then happily hauling the empties back inside fences after the garbage trucks had passed on by, picking up what the trucks had left behind. A woman dressed in pink and black was walking with her dog. She stopped so that her dog might say hello to two larger dogs resting in the shade behind a wrought iron fence. The dogs were friends and always liked to poke their noses through the iron bars, just to sniff and say hello. Another woman with bare arms was pushing a stroller, her baby sound asleep.  Young men in white t-shirts were talking  outside the corner store.

And then some yahoo walked up to a twenty-year-old man and shot him. That young man never recovered; he died in less than hour across town in the hospital. The police had passed by only twenty minutes before the shooting, and when they returned again, the gunman had already left the scene. They have no suspect.

Tonight, the dogs on the block are barking. The moon is high in the sky. Someone is playing a radio maybe a little loud but the music is sweet. The bus passes by on schedule. Car doors slam, and gate hinges squeak. Somewhere, blocks to the north, a siren, and there above the pink house,  in the blue black sky, a single star.

Rest in peace.