The Least Among Us

A chance happening last night gave me an opportunity to observe myself.

I am occupying.  OCCUPYing with OCCUPY ANTELOPE VALLEY, our local group of Occupy Wall Street.  Though I’m not there 24/7, and no one is at our site yet, we have a site and we have a group of a few dedicated individuals and we’re growing.  One choice we have made is to move our Occupy site from one of the nicer city parks to what we refer to as “Plane On A Stick Park” – it’s Boeing Plaza in Lancaster, California.  Boeing is a major employer in this aerospace town.  The centerpiece of our encampment is a USAF Phantom F-4 mounted in a giant display 30 or so feet in the air – thus “Plane On A Stick”.  The whole park is a few years old and somewhat timeworn, but still impressive.  It’s within a short walk from the Lancaster MetroLink station, the end of the line for this spur of our regional commuter rail line.  Across Sierra Highway is the Lancaster station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. The park is small, in a narrow strip defined by the highway and the rail line, Lancaster Boulevard and a parking lot.  In fact, it’s not even officially designated a “Park”, but is a sidewalk according to the Parks and Recreation folks.  But it’s relatively clean and well-lit, it feels safe. 

Some of the local homeless people use Boeing Plaza as a base during the day.  We checked with them before moving our Occupy site there, and they were cool.  They are, after all, part of the 99 %, and I believe some of them are gaining a sense of empowerment just by associating with the Occupy group.  There are still two groups, but there is definitely interaction and there is no ill-will between us.  We have all made efforts to accommodate.

We performed our first real act of civil disobedience yesterday.  Palmdale Mall was the site of a flash mob.  Fifteen of us met in the center of the mall, at the display where Santa will hold court in a few days.  Once there we removed our coats, revealing our home-made Occupy t-shirts, which came out very well I think.  We did a human microphone for about five minutes and were politely escorted to the mall entrance by security.  Once outside, they told us they were with us and asked where we were located.  I really don’t want to have to go through what our brothers and sisters in Oakland are going through.  I can do without teargas and mace.  But it would be nice to get a little publicity.  We do have some good folks with cameras and we’re getting stuff out on our Facebook pages and on YouTube as best we can.  This is a link to an interview with me, if anyone is interested: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnadljXBWzg&feature=BFa&list=ULnvkRYkGqGqM&lf=mfu_in_order

In fact, three or four of the homeless group were with us at the mall.  When we got back to our encampment, one of our members had brought pizza to celebrate.  It was a good day, it was a good action.

As background, in the last few years I have developed some foot problems.  The first couple of General Assemblies I came to I stood.  I realized that if I continued standing like that for two or three hours at a time I would be crippled.  So I threw a plastic lawn chair in my car, and have carted that back and forth with me.  I get it out when I get to the site.  I certainly don’t mind people sitting in it if I’m not using it, but I don’t mind asking people to move if I want to sit, either.  And that’s worked pretty well so far.

Last night, as the pizza was being doled out, I returned to my car to grab my jacket as I was getting chilly.  My chair was already out.  As I returned to the group, a man sat in my chair.  He is one of the homeless group.  He’s from India.  He tells a rather strange and disjointed story, and I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not.  I don’t think he’s dangerous but to be honest he does make me a bit uncomfortable.  My first inclination was to ask him to move so I could sit.  I feel sure he would have; he is always meek and mild-mannered.  But then I thought – how long has it been since this guy has been able to sit in a chair and share food with “normal” people?  The kitchen where many of these people get their meals does have tables and chairs to be sure.  But just to be able to sit in a casual group and eat pizza – I don’t have much, but I have a plastic chair. 

So he sat, and he talked, and he enjoyed himself.  After a while, one of the other chairs in the circle became vacant and I sat, and the other man continued to sit and talk and eat and enjoy himself. I listened.  He introduced himself but I honestly didn’t understand his name, or much of what he said.  My hearing isn’t what it used to be and his accent is fairly heavy. Trains and traffic often drown out the spoken word.

 I don’t really have anything left to give at this point, at least not money or material possessions – my assets are gone.  But maybe I was able to give a little man from India, a man who must feel apart and alone much of the time, an hour of respite last night, an hour of feeling like a normal person, an hour of feeling a part of.

How We Treat Our Heroes

Anthony is a firefighter in one of the square states north of Texas and south of the Canadian border.  I met him in one of the online communities that have sprung up so ferociously these last couple of years.  His story is one I cannot get out of my head, and is the story which has prompted me to attempt blogging.  This is a story every American needs to hear. 

            In October, 2005, Anthony rescued seven people from drowning during a flash flood.  He received a commendation for this from the governor, now a member of President Obama’s cabinet.  When I googled Anthony’s name, I found a slew of stories with his name in them, and everything I found shows him to be a true stand-up guy, the kind you want as a neighbor or the kind you pray your daughter will date and marry.  He started off as a volunteer in the township fire department and after several years moved up to assistant chief and then chief.  I found several newspaper stories of heroic rescues.  Anthony tells me that on his watch, there was only one fatality.  An elderly lady in a wheelchair was unable to get out of her burning house after she called 911. They knew she was still in the house because she was still talking to dispatch on the phone, and dispatch relayed the information.  The roof began collapsing as his men entered the burning structure and they had to back out.  I’ve never heard Anthony’s voice but when I read how they found the woman’s body phone still in hand, I could feel his agony.

His life hasn’t been a bed of roses.  Anthony had been married to his wife and mother of his four grown children for 25 years when she ran off with a preacher.  I know it’s cliché, but I grew up in a small town, and I can remember two instances of ministers running off with other women.  Only someone from a small town can understand what kind of special shame is felt by the innocents in such a case, even today.  Anthony later started dating a woman he and his family had known for twenty years.  They fell in love, and Betty, her teenage daughter Morgan, and Anthony moved in together as a family.  On her fifteenth birthday, Morgan fell off a jetski. Something was strained in the fall; continued pain in Morgan’s leg and back and repeated exams led to discovery of cancer in Morgan’s pelvic bone several months after the fall.  Anthony went to his human resources to check about getting Morgan on his insurance.  He was told if he and his wife would legally marry, he could put Morgan on his insurance as if she had been born to him. 

Next, the township board met and fired Anthony.  At the time (that was in 2007) Anthony and his wife decided their daughter’s health was the only battle they could fight.  Even though they believed the firing to be illegal, they decided to marshal all their resources in the fight to save their daughter.  Eighteen months after Anthony was fired, Morgan died.  When Anthony did take his case to his state’s Ethics Board, he was told that, indeed, he had been fired illegally, but too much time had elapsed before he decided to take action, so nothing could be done to remedy the situation.

Bankrupt from their daughter’s medical bills and jobless because he’s blacklisted, Anthony and Betty have lost their home to foreclosure.  As of this writing, he has to be out of the house by the end of the year.

If you cannot understand and do not share my anger on reading this story, do not ever read me again, because you will never understand anything that I write.  What is the key in this whole tragedy?  I haven’t even uttered the words yet.  The legal scam we Health Insurance.  The scam that allows corporations to extract premiums from us for years and then deny coverage, either through canceling insurance outright or making premiums so expensive as to be prohibitive. Anthony was fired not because he was doing a poor job.  He was fired because he was going to put a very expensive juvenile cancer patient onto their insurance roll and the township’s premiums would skyrocket as a result.  You can always find another fireman, especially in this economy, but money is hard to come by.

And health insurance is only a part of the whole scam that is Wall Street.  Health insurance is but one way that the top one percent has extracted “excess funds” from the rest of us.  Why is health insurance so expensive?  One reason is that drugs are so expensive.  Drugs are so expensive because drug companies create new drugs that don’t do things any better than the ones we have been taking for fifty or a hundred years.  They get a patent on the new drugs, which give them exclusive rights, and push through advertising that if you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol or erectile dysfunction then their pill is the remedy you need.  They give doctors thousands or even millions of dollars to conduct studies on their new patent drugs and those studies inevitably come out favorable.  The same drugs can be bought in Canada or elsewhere for a fraction of what we pay in the US, but it’s illegal to buy them out of the country and bring them back in.  Government medical programs are often forbidden to even get competitive bids on drugs they buy.

 I can go on and on but I’m not going to try to connect all the dots in my blogging.  Matt Taibbi and a number of other writers are doing a much better job of that than I can.  I am going to try to tell the stories of some people whose lives have been broken by the institutions upon which we all depend.  If you have a different take on why Anthony and his family have suffered this tragedy, I’d welcome your response.

Anthony and Betty’s story has, if not exactly a happy ending, at least a hopeful one.  They have secured property outside of town and have started an off-grid organic farm.  They’ve constructed rainwater catchment and a gravity water feed and everything should be ready for them to move in by the time they have to leave their home.  They will sell organic produce and live plants and seeds.  It doesn’t sound like they’ll get rich, but it sounds to me like they know what they’re doing and they might just make it.  I think they’re survivors.  I wonder whether I’ll be one.