Days passed slowly, dragging the way they do when you’re anticipating something but don’t have much of a schedule, day to day. JJ kept up with the Occupy site, scanned the local news for stories; of course it was barely mentioned in the mainstream. He even got mildly interested in the end of the baseball season. Not that he had followed it much since being a kid, yelling for the Phillies, but the Giants made it to the pennant and squeaked through the playoffs, and then ended up winning the World Series.
Oscar had invited a bunch of people over for what turned out to be the winning game. So they were all kicking back after, toasting each other with beers, ribbing the one guy with Detroit roots who had come by, teasing a couple of the girls who said they were more interested in the hot players than the rules. There were firecrackers going off, lots of yelling, some sirens, but from their place bordering the Mission and Noe Valley, it didn’t sound much different from a regular rowdy Saturday night.
Turns out there had been some big damn riots, though. Happens it was trash night, and guys had lit bond fires in the middle of intersections. Some dude was dumb enough to post pictures of himself cracking the windshield of a Muni bus. JJ, when he finally caught up to the news, was pretty damn incredulous, both the he had missed the whole thing, and that so many people had spontaneously gathered and taken over the streets. Gotten so many random people involved, gotten all that publicity. Over baseball. Is that what it took to set them off?
He wondered just what was needed to get things moving across the bay. The original Occupy had felt spontaneous, and had been for some people. But it took coordination, thought, planning. The night before the demo, he found himself thinking of the 9/11 terrorists. Teams of those guys had planned the thing out over months and months, placing the dudes in apartments, making practice runs in airports. Shit, paying the cost of flying these guys around just to see if they could easily get on the planes.
Imagine having the patience to pull that off, to wait that long. To figure out all the steps, to manage to take over a plane using box cutters. Some of the guys he knew, the more hard core ones, had talked about arming themselves. Not like terrorists, but for defense. Shields against the cops’ batons, and maybe some sign posts that could function as batons too. Maybe even carrying heat, in case of an unauthorized police raid, for instance. Even Oscar had told him he had a rifle locked away in his bedroom closet. No big deal, he’d said, just something from his dad, something he could bring down and use to scare off an intruder, from back when the neighborhood was more dicey.
Just thinking about it all made it hard for JJ to fall asleep. It would be stupid to take anything even close to a gun to the demo, but imagine the reaction if someone did. The extra attention it might bring. If it came down to that, he would be sure to get near some cameras, make their points where the TV news could take them down. He shifted in his bed and told himself to chill.
Morning of the day, barely awake, a call came and he answered it, not even looking, expecting updates about actions. A surprise, then, to hear his dad offering a hearty and cheerful hello.
“Dad,” he said. “Isn’t it kind of early?” Dad usually called on the weekend, and JJ wondered if he had forgotten a birthday or something. Of course Jackie usually called about that – unless it was Jackie’s birthday?
JJ tuned back to his father’s voice; Dad was rumbling on about just checking in, and how Amelia wanted to have a word with him.
JJ pulled a fresh t-shirt over his head and moved into the kitchen to look for something to eat. It was later than he thought, but he had time enough not to rush.
“Now, I know where you’re going today, JJ, let’s just cut to the chase,” came his stepmother’s voice in his ear.
“Hey, Amelia, how’s it going?”
She gave an impatient tsk. Unlike his own family, Amelia never seemed to be put off track by him changing the subject or interjecting a dumb question. She went on, her voice kindly but firm. Saying how her friends from that group had tried to interject the need for a long term perspective, how some of the behavior of his colleagues, as she called them, was not helpful to the goals, would appear so silly and immature. That violence begets violence, where fairness all around was in order, being the central goal of the thing from the start.
“They were violent, you know,” JJ interjected. “It was a police bean bag that sent our guy to the hospital.”
“I’m certainly not condoning that,” Amelia exclaimed. “But think how it worked back during Vietnam, are you old enough to remember any of that? Nobody paid much attention to the protests when it was seen as screaming hippies. But when middle class kids got involved, suburbanites, that’s when the leaders in Washington sat up and took notice.”
She said some more, but JJ started tuning out approximately where she said Vietnam. Which, like, no, how would he remember that, he was born in 1974. His early memories of politics were of a smiling man named Ronald Reagan. People making fun of Jimmy Carter’s sweater, people celebrating after those hostages were released.
Vietnam was history, and history, even Amelia would have to admit, got rewritten by those in power. Who knows what had actually happened back then. More to the point, who cares? It was irrelevant now. As far as JJ knew, aside from somehow organizing without the internet or even cell phone technology, all those people had been a lot better off financially than people were now. College was practically free, rents were tiny, students could study and smoke awesome weed and still have time to protest because they didn’t need two and three jobs. And women hardly had to work at all – even his mom had stayed home as a housewife back when his sisters were first born.
JJ finally cut in and told his stepmother that she was really giving him some things to think about. That he would love to hear more about all of it, but for now he had to go.
“I know you feel you have to be part of it all, JJ, I understand that,” she said. “I do believe your heart is in the right place. But will you promise me, promise me and your father, to at least stop and think before you do anything you might later regret?”
“Yeah, sure. Don’t worry about me.” JJ ended the call, all polite and sincere. Although the only thing he actually promised himself he would do was check the incoming number before answering it again.
By the time he finally made it over to Oakland, he felt better. A bunch of them took BART over together. He felt that sense of camaraderie again, as more people got on the train downtown, took each other in at a glance, all clearly headed to the same place. He could feel the veiled glances of other riders, intimidated, admiring? Nobody meeting their eyes anyway. They left the train in a fast moving mass, and grouped together at the plaza, gathering but careful not to challenge any of the police just yet.
The cops were already out in force, that was for sure. And JJ could see news vans parked out on the street, bored cameramen smoking, waiting for the TV people to show up, or for something to happen. A fair number of other people milled around, hard to tell if they were here for the demo or just wanted to film it on their phones or make a movie for a school project or something. Around him, some of them joked around as they hung out – good thing the damn economy was still so bad that everyone had spare time to be here before the end of the work day.
JJ laughed too, but it also pissed him off. Because it had been so long, years now, that he and people like him were getting the short end of things. Government bailing out banks too big to fail, companies making obscene profits, fat CEOs giving themselves fat bonuses while regular people couldn’t find work. And for someone like himself, someone who was considered talented and special, well, it riled him all the harder. He deserved a hell of a lot more than he had gotten over the last months and years and even decades.
Somebody swatted JJ’s arm, told him to cheer up, wasn’t this his thing? He shook himself out of his head and smacked the guy’s arm back, and they compared signs. Some people had gotten pretty creative, they a
greed. Across the plaza, several guys were putting on masks, bandanas, painting their faces. He watched an apple cheeked young photographer setting up a picture of a guy angrily staring out behind his “Hella Occupy” sign, and wondered if she was even reading the signs or just taking arty photos, mindlessly doing her job.
The place was filling, but slowly. More observers than participants, as per usual these days. Some people were using chalk to outline the fallen tents and bodies from the encampment, and JJ grabbed a thick piece to join in. “Yeah, we’re pissed off,” he hollered toward some people who were silently watching. “Come on, you remember what they did here?”
One or two offered a tepid reply, others moved off. There were speeches, and at least a respectable number of people grouped around, hoisting signs and answering the exhortations of the speakers. As night fell, the march began. Almost immediately, JJ could feel the conflict between all the so called moderates, who just wanted to hike around the streets and wave their signs, and those who would take back the plaza and challenge the cops.
A cadre of masked black blockers held their shields in the air, daring anyone to come after them. The bulk of the protesters headed off together, voices rising and falling in disjointed chants, aiming their loudest yells for the TV cameras. But even within the march, different segments challenged each other seemingly as much as the system itself.
It was beyond frustrating, JJ thought. Supposed activists yelling at other activists to stop yelling at the police. Marchers surrounded by cops and cameras trying to look like a force taking over the street, when the streets had been blocked off before they arrived. A hundred people taking pictures of each other, like they’d forgotten any purpose beyond facebook status updates.
People started peeling off long before anything real happened. The group just wasn’t big enough to have a serious impact tonight, JJ could see that even though he would deny it publicly. There had been more cops than protesters the whole time. He fell in with a group of guys who were headed back towards the plaza. But it looked like pretty much a choice of go home and be quiet, or take a quick trip to jail in one of the buses lined up, empty and waiting.
JJ stuck by the edges, avoiding the central plaza where the most cops waited and biding his time, but forcing himself to put his ambitions on hold again. Frustrated again that it wasn’t working, the revolution would not be starting on this particular night. Stronger tactics were needed, maybe even something independent of the half sold out movement spinning its wheels before him. A few sirens sounded, and the acrid smell of tear gas rose from canisters dropped in the back of the plaza. Crumpled signs lay underfoot, and the chalk drawings and splattered paint were unreadable. People were edging down into the BART station or off into the street in pairs or small quiet groups.
Standing in the deep shadows, watching the cops and activists grimly lined up across from each other as the TV news people drove away, JJ couldn’t help but feel a weird sympathy toward the 9/11 terrorists. They must have gotten to the point where they had no choice but to go all in. They must have realized that sacrificing some innocents was the only way to make their point and get it noticed – otherwise they would keep getting completely ignored.