Superopinionated!
Hello! Have another catch-all newsletter, written over the last, idk, month or so? A semi-coherent mess, the usual. The “call to action” for you in this one is that my poetry zine, Schatzi, is now available for sale online via Bishop & Wilde, so you can purchase a copy and have it shipped to you without having to use my ultra-professional process of “Venmo me and put your address in the notes field”. Can’t imagine why other authors don’t do that?? If my love of attention manages to overcome my fear of crowds, we might do a reading later this summer. Stay tuned!
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Locally we are in the middle of city council election season. The city of Portland is structurally broken far beyond how the average US city is broken, and anyone with a large amount of money can functionally buy a council seat if they don't like how a given council member is voting (read: if a council member is being effective at disrupting the deeply dysfunctional status quo). That's happening right now to Joann Hardesty, and one of her highly-funded opponents claims that he would "solve" the worsening crisis of people falling into homelessness here in Portland by arresting them for violating laws like defecating in public.
And so I ask: Where are the homeless people supposed to shit? You don't want them to shit on the sidewalk and that's fine but when I was in the field as an EMT the way it worked initially was I would go in in my little uniform and ask to use the bathroom down at the Plaid Pantry or wherever and they'd let me, that was the agreement everyone seemed to be operating under but that all changed around March of 2020 and after that whoever was behind the counter had new rules, and people love their rules and generally are thinking about following them, they aren't thinking about the fact that I was sitting in an ambulance for 12 hours and the fact that I was asking to use the bathroom meant I had to use the bathroom, they just had their rule that the bathroom was closed and so everyone said no, everywhere. And that was to me, who was in theory saving lives. And it's carried on being that way, although it has shifted back again a bit so I can spend $4 on a coffee I don't want to get a key code to get access to a supposedly public bathroom. Because there are no public bathrooms anymore, not that there were many in the first place.
So where are homeless people supposed to go shit? A lot of businesses (and for that matter, homes) have the cutesy signs in the window about how all are welcome and list off nice sentiments about nationalities and genders and the font has a rainbow wash and then there's a lock on the bathroom door and I can't even imagine what someone with one of those weird new security cameras would do if a stranger came and knocked and asked if they could just come in and pee. (And I'm not sure what I would do, to be honest. I'm not sure I have the emotional elasticity for that these days.)
I just don't understand where people are supposed to go. Because when a person eats, there is a natural byproduct of that process, so unless the next step is ensure that homeless people literally starve, they are going to need to shit somewhere. Or maybe the idea is to feed one half of the homeless population to the other, to be extra efficient. Anything to avoid being reasonable and treating them like people.
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I do not know if you are a praying person but I am one. I am a man who prays. Prayer for me is something I have only learned fairly recently, within the last decade, and it is the thing I do when I know I cannot do anything else. Prayer is an action I take that helps my mind find the path towards making peace with a situation, whatever that may be. I pray and I am slowly learning to not make my prayers too mean, and by that I mean too narrow. When prayer starts to feel like delivering an order to a server at a restaurant, I pray for knowledge of God's will, or the reminder that I am not God, or I pray for us all to know that we are not alone.
But this morning I prayed for revolution, because sometimes you have to break a bone to set it right.
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Read through Theory as Liberatory Practice because I don't know what else to do
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When I think back to the FEMA trainings I took and about what saves people during a disaster -- and as a reminder, nature produces events, our capacity to respond is what defines it as a disaster (or not) -- all of the data points to neighbors and community. It is not your equipment, your gear, your car...not even your go-bag or your gun. People report that they were saved by other people checking on them, over and over again. A neighbor hearing them calling for help. A friend who knew the floor plan of their house and so knew where the baby might be hiding. One of the best way to prepare and be safe is to build ties with your immediate neighbors, to be known to them as a person and for you to know them in turn and associate with them regularly in a neighborly way. I do not think this is a guarantee against harm, but nothing is.
My personal experience is that when there is a crisis, people want to help each other. Part of my training in both emergency medicine and in disaster management covered how to designate roles for bystanders and give them jobs because there are often so many people who want to help that they can get in the way if you don't help them to be helpful. That may not be your experience, and that's ok. We can all only make decisions based on what we know. But I am also trying to stay grounded on what I know and build from there, instead of making choices based on what I'm afraid of.
I also think about all the training I received working as a rape crisis counselor, all the learning I did through the Victims of Violence program about guns and the role they play in interpersonal relationships, and again some of my training as an EMT specifically around deescalation with patients. I'm going to set aside the political and philosophical meanings of guns for this; I'm not using "guns" as a stand-in for some larger concept like "freedom". When one person introduces a gun into a situation with another person that is a physical threat, and using the lens of domestic/intimate partners, it is considered physical violence (because threats of physical violence still do damage, sometimes as much or more than an actual act, particularly in situations where the threats are repeated). So bringing a gun into the home is introducing violence into the home -- because I feel unsafe I then am put into a state of mind where I am willing to make my home less safe. And then what happens, to be blunt: guns are for suicide. Guns are for murdering someone you live with, quite possibly someone you love. Guns are for children accidentally killing each other or themselves. That is what happens when a gun is in the home. It creates an opportunity for a level of violence that wouldn't exist without the gun. I do not think I am so exceptional as to be outside the majority of households; I think I am like most other people.
Or, a gun is an easy excuse a cop will use for why they murdered you. But if the police are going to murder you, they don't need a reason, and if you think you can outgun the police then I'm not sure why you're reading this; you parted ways with reality a while ago. If I understand the Supreme Court's recent decision correctly (and it's possible I don't; I have a difficult time these days paying much attention to the criminally immoral) it's legal in Portland for ICE to break through my door and kill me with no warrant because we are within 100 miles of a port. A lot of work lies ahead to enact a lot of change; for me, I can't do that work if I'm convinced of my imminent death at all times to the point that I think I might need to murder another person. I understand many people are worried that death is near -- I understand death well might be. I suppose I am just not willing to live afraid, nor am I willing to terrorize other people and call it strength.
Please do not misunderstand: I'm not advocating not fighting. I love a good fight. But I've never seen a de-arrest require a gun. And for every situation I walked into with very angry people when I was wearing nothing but my little polyester uniform shirt, the only thing those angry people needed to know was that I wasn't a cop and then shit chilled out pretty fast. And I refuse to be afraid of my neighbors, or to let assholes teach them to be afraid of me. And I know they have a lot of bullets, but they can't shoot all of us (even if they shoot me).
Cops need guns, and I'm not a cop.
Whatever we thought we needed before, we need each other now.
