Occupying Havana

It’s not the same old suspects. It’s not a bunch of tired lefties. It’s the new movement. It has its own energy, its own songs, its own language. And unlike protests of the past it has captured Havana’s imagination.

Now instead of her dragging us away from the protest, it’s us dragging her away.

The large encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza below Oakland’s ornate City Hall was like some kind of earthy, disheveled Disney Land for her. We’d walk through the scores of tents, over the wooden sidewalk to the mass kitchen, the library, the tech center, the supply center, the girls were in awe. “It’s like a whole village” Havana remarked as she longingly stared at the youth busy about their days in Occupy Oakland.

Havana has undoubtedly been politicized by her school being closed. While 5-year old Ilyana who had only just begun Kindergarten to hear her school was closing and is somewhat disoriented by the process, Havana is fighting mad.

On the day after the School Board announced its final decision to ignore parents, children and teachers and close 5 Oakland schools, Karen sat the girls down at breakfast to let them know we’d lost this fight. Havana who had doodled through the previous nights Board meeting, did not miss a thing. During the evening she had even asked me for the names of Board members.

On that next morning when Karen had sat the girls down for the bad news, Havana bounced up in her chair. “Well we need to have a flier for school today! A flier with all the pictures of the School Board on it. With boos next to the ones that voted to close our schools and yays next to the others,” she paused and then emphasized, “I need the flier to give out at recess.”

Bloody hell. . . .

Bloody hell.

Karen told me this story over cell phone while I was pounding nails at work at 7am. I was initially shocked and then I felt so happy, that it felt like something big rising in my chest that I couldn’t control.

And then yesterday the girls and I put on our Maxwell Park Elementary t-shirts, while their mom worked, and we marched with Occupy to another school on the closure hit-list. About 3-5,000 people marched by five big billion-dollar banks where we announced each banks’ profits and tax evasion numbers. It made the School District’s savings from closing schools look like pocket change.

About 10 of us collected hundreds of petition signatures for the Recall of the 5 School Board members. They’d voted to close schools so that the rich can stay tax-free and our wars can be fully funded.

Towards the end of the march Havana wanted to be at the front and wee Ily was so tired I had to put her up on my shoulders.

At Lakeview Elementary where thousands amassed, I spoke on the back of the Occupy truck with 3 other good comrades: two parents from Lakeview and Mike from Santa Fe.

I spoke about how our school had been a foundation of our neighborhood for 85 years and how many kids are the 3rd generation to go to our great school. I talked of the wrong direction the country is heading in, the need to kick out all those politicians that put money before people and the need to end the dictatorship that big business holds over this country.


I concluded by talking about the emotional impact of school closures. “What do we tell our children when they walk past the schools they were evicted from and see kids in the playground from the new charter-private school there. Or they see private businesses on our school ground?

“More than 80% of Maxwell Park children are eligible for free or subsidized lunch. Our students have had hard lives and now they’re being evicted. Will this make Oakland more safe and less dangerous? This has got to end.”

After we got in the car, Havana insisted we drive downtown to see the confrontation as several thousand people marched back downtown to takeover an empty city lot. There were a hundred cops waiting for them. As we got stuck in traffic by the march, the girls got out of their car seats, opened their windows and gave “v” signs to the passing marchers.

A PG&E truck was pulled up beside us; the driver got out and took pictures of the march on his cell phone. We chatted and then he summed up the current movement, “You know, all I can say is . . . it’s about time this happened. It’s about time.”

Havana and Ily’s generation will either be a part of tearing down what's rotten in this world or building the new world. A world where equality and diversity are cherished and where the 99% become the 100%.

Soccer, Evolution and Season's End

Evolutionarily, parenting has one simple goal. Our job, as parents, is perpetuation. Or put more simply: our job is to raise parents. And the strangest part of this process that has been going on at least two million years is that when you’re doing it you don’t realize you are.

Inversely, nothing brings us back to our own childhoods like becoming a parent. Our past can stand at our window, like Banquo’s ghost, pointing fingers at our errors. And we know we’ve erred when we do those things we hated about our own childhoods. Those things we thought we’d never repeat.

I’d never planned on being a soccer dad. On passing on the obsession of soccer. But, the door was left ajar and now I am perpetuating my mild obsession. And sadly, this week ends Havana’s first season of soccer.

Tonight, instead of our last practice before our last game on Saturday, the 14 girls of the Super-Strikers team are to watch-and-learn from a televised British Premier League game at the coach’s house.

Tonight is the crossing of two paths. It’s a small cultural convergence. British soccer, my own roots and the pick up and drop off sport of children, American soccer.

I admit, I like the game. I like the shape of the ball. I like watching it move. I get almost as much satisfaction watching 22 people I’ve never met play with this ball as I do from playing with it myself. Yet my own evolution towards the sport was somewhat rocky.

Like most things forced on me at school, I rejected soccer for many years.

The notion of going out onto a freezing soggy field in the middle of winter and swapping your long pants and long sleeves for short ones made little sense to me. At my school, the soccer field grew longer the longer winter was with us. Its potholes were filled with ice, its flat spots rose glacially up into small hills and traversing the length of the field even without a ball was an endeavor.

Twenty unhappy boys, heads lowered, would march onto the pitch. The teacher would yell, blow his whistle and resume yelling. Then twenty young boys with mud plastered up and down their legs and matted in their hair, heads bowed, would leave the battle field.

This ritual did not enthuse me for the game.

And yet soccer did eventually ignite something in me.

At 16, I started full-time work and had the money to enter the world of grownups. Specifically, I could now enter through the mythical door to the cultural epicenter of British life: the local pub. A year or two later, the 20-odd pubs in my area of West London were my life’s main reference points.

We’d meet at the pub, cram into cars and make the weekly pilgrimage to Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea stadium. We donned our colors, sported our self-inked tattoos and joined the 50,000 other young men that pressed themselves into the stadium stands. We sang, we chanted, we jumped so high that the concrete stands seemed to shake. I entered the world of men, as I knew it to be.

And we occasionally went to Away matches that involved both increased cost and increased risk. I was once on a train intercepted by rival fans. Thud! A brick bounced off the plexi-glass window of the train car. We all hit the deck, wild-west style. And then, more thuds, this went on for about a minute, which I calculated at the train’s speed meant an assault by the rival fans over a distance of a quarter mile. These lads were well organized. And the Chelsea train had not yet gotten into the rival town's station!

My baptism of soccer could not contrast greater with Havana’s.

On Saturday afternoons I get my camping chair and we head out to watch Havana and the local Under 10s league. The language of the supporters is more cautious and more clean, and there are no anthems sung by parents. There is even very little mud, with games sometimes canceled on the rumor of rain. And yet for many of these girls this is the place where they will find themselves. Where they will test themselves and where they will be challenged. It’s a safe environment for young girls to experience physical conflict.

No-one would question that the winding roads that led Havana and I to soccer have been different. But then our childhoods have been remarkably different too.

What I honestly do not know is if hers is a better childhood than my own. But then, in a sense, that is for her to judge and not I.

Our Day at the Oakland General Strike

Seven weeks ago the lives of 900 Oakland children and their parents were seriously disrupted. Five Oakland elementary schools were being considered for closure. After a dozen meetings in half as many weeks, the School Board ended its period of so-called consultation. For hours upon hours, parents, children and teachers expressed their love for their schools. And up on the stage, the School Board simply sat there checking their watches.

Subsequently we have heard that many concrete plans were in place to close the schools a long time before the final vote of the Board.

It’s in this background that a thousand young people, parents and teachers marched on the School Board on the day of November 2nd, 2011, the historic Oakland General strike initiated by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Two of the 900 students that will be kicked out of their schools this year are Havana and Ilyana, our daughters. One is in 3rd grade and one a Kindergartener. We kept them home from school on the day of the strike. Their mom, the following day, handed in a note at the school office. It read “Havana and Ilyana were absent yesterday, as the closure of their school made them sick.”

At 9.30ish on the day of the strike, friends, parents and kids began arriving at our house to make picket signs for the day. About 20 of us were scattered around the front room busily using sharpies on our pink poster boards. “Kids are the 99%” was one, “Keep our schools open” was another. Being mostly younger kids there was a fair amount of animation used to get their message out. Later on BART I noticed one parent “x” out a crown on a princess, with a sly smile to the other parents as she did it.

Our ragtag group entered the quad at Laney community college where a couple of hundred students were listening to speakers and rappers. There was plenty of music to keep our kids totally in awe. It’s funny, but Occupy just makes a good fit with kids. It’s just not shaped like the boring protests of past. A parent arrived from another elementary school on the closure list, Lakeview, with news that they’d shut down their school altogether. Wow! Only 20 kids were on site out of 300 children. It was solid.

More feeder marches of dozens and sometimes hundreds entered into our rally site and in less than an hour we were heading off with a huge head of steam to the School Board. The plan for the action at the School District building was for a couple of parents to hand in an Eviction notice to the elected School Board members that’d voted to close our schools. They’d evicted 900 young children from their schools, now we were putting them on notice that their time in office is going to be over.

We sent three runners ahead of the march to let the District’s smooth-talking spokesperson know we were coming and for him to come down and meet us. A secretary sent the three young people up to his office, but they lost their way in the hallways. The sight of one of our people in a hoodie wandering the offices of the District set off a small panic, “we’re being occupied!” Our people explained to their people, that, well, that wasn’t totally true. The District’s PR guy headed downstairs.

A thousand people were coming up the street, with banners, signs and an incredible loud energy. The press mounted the steps to get their best shots in. And we took a bullhorn and read out our eviction notice: for evicting our 900 children, for doing this dirty work for the 1%, you are hereby given notice: we will evict you from office. Our children’s future’s will not be cut!

A harried and anxious School Official stood in the background as the Eviction Notice was read out. We handed him the symbolic Notice. He looked somewhat shocked, but not nearly as pained as our parents have felt over the past seven weeks.

I looked over the crowd of mostly high school students, union workers and people that just care. Every color of humanity was there. And then in a creative curve I personally hadn’t anticipated, one kid yelled, “You’ve been served! You’ve been served!” And within seconds everyone was chanting to the School Board, “You’ve been served! You’ve been served!” And I looked out from the steps of the School Board at the crowd and thought, this is my Oakland. This is why I love this city.

And our huge convulsive energy of a thousand people, with more than a thousand reasons to be there, headed out down the street to join the epicenter of Occupy Oakland at Oscar Grant Plaza. In our wake we left behind a stunned Education official and a couple of sweating School Board cops and a group of journalists busily scribbling down what they’d just witnessed.

They had just witnessed the future. And I thought of Havana and Ilyana and how upset they are about Maxwell Park school being closed. And on this day I saw their excitement and shared their feeling of power. And more than ever before I understood that we will have a future because the youth of today will turn this world upside down.