June 30 2018 march of apx. 25,000 from Dolores Park to Civic Center, part of a wave of nationwide protests against the incredibly cruel family separation policy.
It’s summer in San Francisco, which comes with free air conditioning (whether you want it or not!). The rest of the Bay Area and most of California, and in fact a great deal of the world seems to be suffering sweltering, record-breaking heat. Here, hot air meets the cold ocean and we reliably get cooling fog, or as it’s known locally “Karl the Fog.”
Then there’s the other fog. The fog of lies and insults that passes for presidential communications these days. But that’s not worth thinking about, except to note that it is traumatizing for millions of people, and the daily repetition is producing a society numb or trembling with post-traumatic stress disorder. The unbearable cruelty of separating small children from their parents at the border has put us all in the position of being forced to watch torture carried out in our name. I just saw a piece on The Intercept where they found a 4-year-old and her 15-month-old sister still separated from their parents. It’s just so horrifying. While there have been some spirited protests and occupations at ICE offices, the story was mostly buried after the fake retreat by the administration. Overall the trumpian strategy works at throwing people on the defensive. Before they can get their bearings and actively resist, the attack shifts again, the assault comes from a new direction. Many people just grow more exhausted and demoralized—exactly as planned!
on Dolores Street, June 30
I don’t think there’s any real agenda driving this madness beyond personal enrichment and the insatiable lust for attention of one of history’s most childish and needy narcissists to ever gain executive power. But it doesn’t do us much good to spend time analyzing him, trying to find a crack in the fragile edifice of this immeasurably shallow, stupid, and casually cruel sociopath. Clearly the people in the administration have an aggressive agenda to attack anything associated with ecological sanity, seize resources and public assets, and destroy whomever stands in their way. I keep track of the ongoing descent into barbaric chaos mostly online and on late night comedy, but have abandoned my former attentiveness to the “news.” I know it’s very bad out there as the kleptocrats, militarists, racists, and assholes are riding high. I think they will get their comeuppance eventually, but I also know that such thoughts could be nothing more than a revenge fantasy based in an exaggerated sense of karma and ultimate justice. Time will tell I suppose.
Ice Caps Yes, ICE No! June 15, quickie demo at ICE offices on Sansome Street.
March to Civic Center, June 30
June 15 at ICE doors.
Instead of wringing my hands, or betting on a blue-female wave saving us in the midterms, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking and writing. I’ve got a new book on local history coming out next spring. We’ve been putting together our Fall schedule for Shaping San Francisco’s Talks and Tours. And I’m on the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust (also my “landlord”) and helping to work through some essential organizational dynamics. And of course I’m out walking a lot, so if you’re on the streets of San Francisco and see me strolling by, say “hi!”
And I’ve popped out to a variety of demonstrations that have been erupting regularly on local streets. On May 31, I joined with a variety of comrades to blockade over a dozen tech shuttle buses at 24th and Valencia, using the suddenly ubiquitous e-scooters to build small barricades. The e-scooters themselves were widely reviled as they cluttered our streets (since removed) and are a sickening kind of get-rich-quick e-waste with a projected lifespan of only 3 months, depending on low-paid gig workers to collect, recharge, and reallocate them to the streets each morning. Yuck! On June 15 I made my way downtown on a quick call to join with a few dozen folks in front of the ICE offices here. There’d been a lockdown/blockade there a couple of months earlier, and an occupation closed its driveways for about a week over the July 4 week before the police rousted it. June 30 tens of thousands joined nationwide protests, marching from Dolores Park to the Civic Center, following the usual big marches during the Gay Pride weekend June 22-24.
May 31 blockade of 24th and Valencia, using the e-scooter junk to continue local protests against tech displacement and evictions.
Sweatshirt for the Ethnic Studies College at San Francisco State University, created in the wake of the 1968 student/faculty strike.
After the most recent mass shooting in Florida, the sudden emergence of articulate teenagers demanding gun control laws has been inspiring. It is impossible not to also notice that their platform has been amplified by widespread media coverage in a way that the protests against day-to-day violence perpetrated by police in San Francisco and the rest of the cities of the U.S. is not. This past Thursday, thousands of angry protesters blocked the Interstate and then the local sports arena in Sacramento after police murdered an unarmed young African American father in his grandmother’s backyard. An egregious mistake, clearly, but one all too easily normalized in the police state we live in. Only a couple of weeks ago a 19-year-old Latino was killed in a hail of bullets poured into the trunk of a car where he was hiding—just a few blocks from my home—fearing that if apprehended he might be deported to a Mexico he never knew (he was part of an undocumented family).
While the bodies pile up around the country thanks to out-of-control police, crazed white men with too many guns, and the everyday mayhem imposed by a fraying society that leaves so many isolated and desperate, it’s easy to overlook the elephant in the room. The United States is a huge war machine. As Andrew Bacevich aptly laid it out in a recent open letter to the New York Times, we’re practically two decades into a war with no name, no apparent strategic goal, and no acknowledgment of its actual cost ($7 trillion and counting). It spreads across multiple countries (mostly in the greater Middle East, but increasingly popping up in Africa and other parts of Asia too) and has already led to devastating destruction in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, and with the appointment of war criminal and madman John Bolton as new National Security Advisor more war, not less, is squarely on the agenda.
On March 14 students walked out from schools across San Francisco and the country…. these are Horace Mann students with families and faculty…
With all due respect and enthusiasm for the teenage campaign for gun control, we aren’t going to reproduce the Australian experience, where a mass shooting led to the massive disarming of the society along with strict legal limits on guns. Background checks, waiting periods, etc. won’t disarm the country. The 2nd Amendment itself must be repealed before any meaningful disarmament can take place. The 3% of the country that owns 50%+ of the guns isn’t going to give up their arms without using them first. The deep psychological commitment to arms has historical roots that were briefly brought to the surface during the spate of Confederate monument removals. The white racists in this society built those monuments to rewrite the history of the Civil War. Though they lost the war and don’t completely control the historical narrative, they’ve had remarkable success during a century of ongoing racist domination and plunder. The use of weapons by private citizens in this age-old racist order is one of its central characteristics.
Writing in her most recent book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 2018), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses the empty debate between the NRA and its opponents over the true meaning of the 2nd Amendment. She agrees that the 2nd Amendment guarantees a personal right to arms, but wants to recover the history of the time in which such a right would be declared:
Any assessment of gun violence and the Second Amendment in the United States is incomplete or skewed without dealing with what the guns were for, and, given what they were for, what that means about their popularity and proliferation today. The United States created its armed forces and police to carry out a genocidal policy against Native peoples, seize Native land, and control African Americans, which continues to this day in other forms, including police shooting unarmed Black men and incarcerating a large percentage of them. In the process, the United States has invented enemies and spent hoards of wealth to erect the largest military force in history, including a vast network of hundreds of military bases in more than seventy countries and territories around the globe. (p. 194)
Our culture is obsessed with spectacular violence, from video games to popular movies. Sports events open with the tedious national anthem, often adding in salutes to honor “our Armed Forces” as though the murderous violence they carry out in far-off countries was somehow noble or ethical. Few Americans even bother to think about what it might be like to be aerially bombarded, even when they stand and watch flyovers of the Blue Angels and other military aircraft during organized festivals of pro-military propaganda like Fleet Week here in the SF Bay Area, or national holidays like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. But as Roxanne asks in her book, why is there such a deep commitment to this martial culture, why do Americans identify so much with militarism and armed violence? To answer this we have to go deep into the national history, unpacking the myths of the frontier and the false idea of an inevitable spread of civilization against more primitive cultures.
February 28 2014 blockade of ICE offices in downtown San Francisco after raids around northern California.
Just after finishing the delivery of my Talk in Spanish, following Olatunji Oboi Reed of Equiticity, who opened…
I had a great time in Lima, Peru at the 7th annual World Bike Forum (Forum Mundial de Bicicleta #FMB7). It’s nothing like VeloCity or any bicycle industry conference, though apparently it does have something in common with the North American BikeBike conference that I’ve never been to. It takes place over 4 days with all-day meetings and workshops each day, with a kind of Critical Mass at the end of most days. We also had a famous cumbia band, Los Mirlos, who played opening night to a small audience in the stadium where we held the event, starting with a new song about bicycling they’d just written in collaboration with a number of attendees. The FMB is very grassroots, nearly everyone who comes is involved in some kind of nonprofit organization or volunteer advocacy group, with plenty of aficionados of touring, mountain biking, BMXing, and other forms of bicycle specialization. It is also extremely middle and upper-middle class, as it has been at all the prior gatherings, starting in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2012 and going to Curitiba, Medellin, Santiago, and Mexico City before landing in Lima this year (and Quito next year where the theme is “Mingamos el Mundo!”) There are a smattering of government representatives too, usually folks from various urban transit agencies operating with small budgets and big goals, fighting the Sisyphean task of implanting a bike culture in the congested, choking car-centric cities of Latin America and beyond.
Los Mirlos playing “Bicicleta” at the opening night of the World Bike Forum
As has become my custom in the past few years, I give a “Charla Magistral,” kind of main speech—this time it was the last event of the FMB on Sunday night—and I do it in Spanish. When I watched the video later I had to cringe over my horrible delivery and bad pronunciation, but overall my Spanish is much better than any time previously, and I was able to converse pretty freely with everyone. Some people’s accents are nearly impossible to understand, but I was happily surprised at how many long conversations I was able to have in Spanish after so many years of not being able to. I even did some interviews in Spanish without any help or preparation—I think the interviewers were kind and spoke very clearly and slowly so I could follow their questions, and then I blurted my mangled spanglish and it seemed to turn out OK.
It was great to reconnect with a lot of the “regulars” at the FMB. We’ve become good friends over the years, from my very gracious host in Lima, Octavio, to friends from Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil, Panama, and even the Dominican Republic. This year we all made friends with two guys who traveled all the way from Kathmandu, Nepal, and by happy surprise, they were awarded the FMB9 in 2020! So maybe we’ll all find enough money to make our way to Nepal in 2020… that’s a dream.
Renata Falzoni, legendary Brazilian bike activist for decades, well known for her ESPN era, and now has her own bike channel
Edgar, Claudia, and Bruno, good friends from Arequipa…. I had a great time with Bruno and Claudia in past Forums and the great pleasure to meet Edgar this time.
Ceviche! Peru’s is the best!… we ate very well…
Lima is not a bike-friendly city, and part of the reason for the Peruvians to hold the FMB was to create momentum for more bicycling in Lima and Peru more generally. There are plenty of small groups and some genuine activist commitment, but clearly the city has not embraced the agenda very strongly. There are some bike lanes here and there, mostly in the wealthier parts of town, but they are not heavily used. As soon as you leave a formal bike lane you are thrust into curb-to-curb aggressive traffic. The only saving grace is that it is often gridlocked, so if you’re clever about weaving through blocked cars, you can make your way across the city much faster than someone in an automobile. I have ridden for decades in horrible urban conditions so I wasn’t particularly dismayed at riding in Lima, but it had been a while since I was on streets that really left no room at all to squeeze along the right-hand side. I improvised with some sidewalk jumping and other evasive techniques and fortunately had no problems.
Along the shore cliffs, high above the Pacific, you can find a very nice multi-use path with bike area… in the wealthy part of town.
On Avenida Salvaterry there was a very nice bikeway down the middle, but not heavily used.
A smattering of in-town bike lanes, but not a lot of cyclists, and no connectivity to actually get you across the city.
The Talk I gave is derived from a much longer article I wrote on the idea of a “Bicycling Commons” for a forthcoming book in 2019. (The article goes into some detail about the role of mainstream cycling advocacy falling for neoliberal agendas and helping to derail the Commons aspects that had emerged in the 1990s around the bicycling culture.) In the short excerpt I gave in Lima, I had to explain a bit about the idea of a Commons, since it’s not used in the same way in Spanish, and for the most part, it’s a difficult concept to translate. Interestingly, the next FMB in Quito took the Andean concept of Minga as a theme—it’s a concept that refers to shared collective, cooperative work (in U.S. English we’d probably use as an example the obsolete idea of a barn raising), but they’ve cleverly turned it into a verb and we are all thinking creatively now about how to “mingar” everything!
Here is the English version, with a few awkward parts thanks to having translated it back and forth several times now. I tried to smooth them over, and thus it’s a little different than the Spanish version I gave out loud. The Spanish version is posted as a separate entry.
