Tag Archives: occupy “occupy wall street” “occupy eugene” violence justice protest

Standing Up

Posted on by
Reply
Photo Credit: Dusk Winston

Alley Valkyrie was livid.

Occupy Eugene had come onto her turf, set up camp, and now it looked like it was going to cost her money. This was back in October. Occupy Eugene had been in the Park Blocks for six days. On day number eight, Saturday Market was planning on using that same space. She stood up on our stage, tearing into us for our idiocy. How could we protest Wall Street by Occupying the space used by a weekly marketplace? I watched her up there, silhouetted by a streetlight, her chin jutted forward as she lashed us for our transgression. I thought, “She is really angry.”

This isn’t really a story about Alley Valkyrie. It’s more a story about Alley’s stomping grounds: Downtown Eugene. While I tell the story, Alley will transform. The first time I saw her, she was spitting mad and ripping Occupy Eugene a new one. Before the cops closed our camp at Washington-Jefferson, Alley had become one of the faces of Occupy Eugene.

Eugene is ranked 149th out of the 275 U.S. cities with populations over 100,000. That puts us smack dab in the center of the pack.. The majority of cities in the United States are about Eugene’s size. We come from a state that’s 24th in household Income. Statistically, we are very vanilla. There are lots of cities just like us. That means there are lots of downtowns just like Downtown Eugene. Chances are good, in each of those downtowns, there is at least one person like Alley Valkyrie.

Alley was angry that night on our General Assembly stage. She was angry before Occupy showed up. Alley was angry before Occupy made angry cool. All Summer long, Alley had been dueling with the Eugene Police Department over Downtown. When Occupy moved in, it only made sense that eventually she would join up.

That has to be what the EPD expected. As the police watched Occupy sprout right in the middle of Alley’s beat. They knew that the two of us, Alley and Occupy, were meant for each other. Occupy swept across the nation last fall. You have to know that different offices within Homeland Security were given the job of figuring out who, in the movement, to watch. In that first week, while Alley was ripping us a new one, I’m sure she was already listed by Homeland Security as one of us.

In essence, Occupy joined Alley. For a while, Occupy Occupied Alley. When the cops shut down the camp just before Christmas, Occupy was in the headlines and the editorial pages. Alley was in those stories. People mentioned Alley in letters to the editor. Whatever Alley did, Occupy was doing it through her.

This is a story about Downtown Eugene in the middle of the Occupy Spring. I can’t tell that story without Alley. I also have to give a nod to the Eugene Police Department, and Downtown Neighborhood Association, the lingering threads of the Street Family Alliance, and Occupy Eugene.

Most of the Downtown players were assembled before Occupy Wall Street was even mentioned in Adbusters. For everybody but Occupy, this story began last July. It began at the end of a Homelessness Roundtable at the Eugene Public Library. Until that moment Alley had been just another local merchant. She was a familiar face Downtown, but one of many.

Photo Credit: Erika Kleyne

At the public comment section of the roundtable, Alley stepped up. “Why?” she asked. Her question was aimed at Sgt. Fitzpatrick of the EPD. “Why don’t you hassle me, the same way you hassle the street kids downtown? Why don’t I get ticketed for riding my bike on the sidewalk, the same way street kids do? Why don’t I get trespassing citations for leaning against a wall? Homeless people in Downtown can get arrested for leaning against a wall. Why not me?”

It was Alley and the Police Sargent. When she was done, the room erupted in applause.

Alley was no longer unknown. The EPD knew her and pretty soon, so would Homeland Security. Without even knowing it, Alley had joined Occupy.

Occupy Made Me Do It

Posted on by
6

I think it’s Occupy that I have to blame. Being a big, bad revolutionary has given me an inflated sense of my own place in the universe. It makes me think I am capable of things that I really shouldn’t be. It makes me do things that I ought not. Last Monday, for instance, I think Occupy is the reason I intruded when I saw a man assaulting a woman outside a seedy bar in Eugene.

It wasn’t me. It was Occupy. I was Occupied by the belief that I have personal power. For decades, that belief has been in short supply. It’s the American dichotomy: we see America as a super powerful state, and yet those of us who make up America see ourselves as powerless. How a nation of powerless people can create such a powerful state is beyond me, but we believe it.

We believe that presidents can steal elections and we can’t stop them. Then we believe that same president can start a war, and we can’t stop him. We believe that the Patriot Act can steal away our freedoms, and that the NDAA can take away more freedoms. We believe that we can’t stop horrible things from happening. They keep on happening, and we keep on not stopping these horrible things from happening. It all makes us feel even more powerless. Loot our economy; steal our retirement; take away our health care and our homes. Each injustice makes us feel even more powerless.

Eventually somebody has to stand up and say, “Stop!”

That’s why we Occupy.

Somebody has to stand up. Somebody has to tell the people with all the money that they have to leave something for the rest of us. Somebody has to tell the corporate run government, that it’s time for change. Somebody has to stand up and demand our rights and create that change, because nobody is going to do it for us.

That’s why we Occupy.

We are the ones who are standing up.

Marching through the streets yelling, “Whose streets? Our streets!” gives you a sense of power. However, once you stand up. Once you understand what it means to stand up, it becomes really hard in the future, to duck your head and avoid the responsibility to stand up.

When I see a woman go running from a car, with a man chasing her, I can’t just shrug it off and tell myself, “Somebody else is going to take care of it.”

Maybe it’s smarter to stay back like all of the other people watching it unfold. They watched the guy trying to stuff her unwillingly into a car. They watched her break away and they watched the guy go chasing after her. Just because I march through the streets decrying economic injustice doesn’t mean I have become some sort of bike-riding street hero.

Unfortunately, it was a woman being menaced by a man right out in public. So I reluctantly detoured across the parking lot of the check-cashing store and rolled over to the crowd of onlookers. I was positive I was making a bad choice. I had visions of getting shot, beat-up, verbally abused, but somebody had to do something and nobody was.

That’s what Occupy does. It forces us to identify the moments which call for action and it forces us to be the person who takes action. We Occupy because we believe we no longer have the choice to wait for somebody else to fix things.

I was full of that belief as I rolled my bike through the line of onlookers. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do, but I knew that I had to do something.