Posted by grillcover on May 21, 2022
Originally published: 01/11/2022
Reflections: (March 2021)
This month things started to really blend as a relentless array of forces collided. Waves of work, org responsibilities, and intense emotional energy crashing over me. Everything still felt like life and death. Indeed, March 2021 began with a vaccination, and ended with a funeral.
The day of my Pfizer first-dose, March 2nd, was also the first day of petitioning for the Democratic primary election in June, where candidates unleash an army of volunteers and paid canvassers to collect signatures from New Yorkers in order to get on the ballot. The requirement had been contested due to the pandemic conditions, but in the end the bar was just lowered a bit.
Picking between several candidates begging for help I chose the Dianne Morales campaign, which had a morning shift in my neighborhood, and at that point was beginning to show promise as a transformative dark horse candidate. I ended up being the only person besides the shift leader to show at 7:00 a.m. in the 25-degree cold on a Tuesday. But working together we still hit his ambitious signature target– with my pulling in more than 2/3rds of them.
Later that day, after I'd warmed back up and gone to the state-run COVID-19 super-site at Medgar Evers College to get my vaccine, as I was exiting my subway station I noticed an unmasked police officer questioning a young man inside by the booth. The questions were pointed and tedious– was he transferring from the bus? Where was he coming from?– but what really bothered me was the loud officer's wide mouth and the spit flying out of it.
I walked over, not to intervene, but just to ask the officer to mask up. He immediately responded by yelling at me to back away. I repeated my request, assuring I wasn't trying to interfere, but we were inside, and he was carrying on loudly unmasked. More yelling. I backed down and remained in the lobby until he was done talking, and again asked him to mask up. At this point he sneered at me, picked up his coffee, pretended to drink it and said, "I'm drinking. I'm allowed to drink." I told him I'd report him, and that's exactly what I went and did. (Spoiler alert: He got in trouble.)
The vaccine laid me out the next day so I had to reschedule petitioning for the Hollingsworth campaign. But by March 4th I was ready to hit the bricks again, this time for Brandon West over in Park Slope. A chance run-in on the street with an old friend I hadn't seen in person since before the pandemic, who just happened to be on an errand in his neighborhood and happily gave his signature, felt like a blessing and a minor return to normalcy.
The next day on March 5th I took part in a constituent meeting that had been organized by Tax The Rich volunteers, leveraging the statewide phone banking into powerful group conversations with target electeds. Unfortunately Sen. Kevin Parker's office had given us the runaround. Our expected Zoom call with him became a telephone call with his Legislative Director, which led to technical difficulties as we tried to give our statements, especially for one constituent calling in from a hospital. (Ed. note: The organizer who put together that meeting, David Alexis, is now running to replace Sen. Parker!)
That weekend, March 6th-7th, I was recruited for a new assignment on the Tax The Rich campaign. The doorhangers and constituent meetings had moved the dial on some of the more amenable representatives, but there were some powerful holdouts we wanted to target. This was how I came to lead pop-up Tax The Rich tables in the belly of the bourgeois beast, the Upper East Side.
It's not an exaggeration that we were in enemy territory up there. The disdainful looks and scoffing I got, the hurled expletives and ardent arguments from people who absolutely could afford to pay more during historic crises were plenty. But I was absolutely bulletproof in my hype armor. One sympathetic woman, a union stage electrician at Lincoln Center, told me I was brave. She'd been in the neighborhood for decades and seen it become much more hostilely upper-crust. I laughed with her and assured her I'd played tougher stages.
And honestly, you never knew which conversations would pay off. Like with two similarly-fancy couples one day– the younger couple kept up an adversarial tone, sealioning despite my thorough, reasonable answers; but the older couple had real concerns, and were honestly relieved by my thoughtful replies and said they'd make the call in support.
March 8th I presented at the Defund Research meeting with a report-back on our progress researching city council candidate platforms. From there, we needed to strategize how we were going to approach people about the pledge – who might already be aligned with us, who might take some convincing, and who were the long-shots?
I was inspired to begin mapping the data, and was surprised and encouraged to find that whether or not people used "Defund" language, the general "divest/reinvest" framework for public safety reform was making sense and taking hold across the city. We then had some follow-up meetings with other leadership and comms team members to dig deeper and begin formal outreach plans.
Below: One of my first weekend teams on the UES. The wind was also incredible, turning over our table and scattering anything not weighed down. Inadvertent leaflet airdrops behind enemy lines!
The rest of the week was– I think "intense" does it some justice.
On March 9th I went to Fort Greene to make up the petitioning shift for Michael Hollingsworth I'd missed the week before. It was going pretty well– I'd helped a new canvasser get comfortable, then we split up and held down different high-flow parts of the avenue. About halfway through, though, I noticed a disturbance spill out into the street from a bar. A woman and her husband, pushing a stroller and steaming at each other, were headed my way.
The woman engaged me, seeming interested in what I had on my clipboard as her husband continued on with the stroller. She nodded along and told me her name to write down, before lowering her voice and saying, "I need help. I'm in a domestic violence situation and I need some help." It was then that her husband started yelling at me to not talk to his wife, and abandoned the stroller to charge me, ready to swing.
As he chased me into the street, she stepped in to stop him, and he punched her fully across the face. There were several people around the intersection all now drawing to the scene– one man was about to call the police when the husband ran up on him threatening to beat him if he didn't put away the phone. But by then a solid crowd had gathered and he fled. People stayed with her and her kid to provide what comfort and support we could, but eventually it was just me and her chatting for the rest of my shift as she collected herself and figured out next steps.
Much later, the police showed up across the street. When she first waved them over they rolled their eyes and shrugged. She told me in a terrified whisper she wasn’t safe with them and asked me to stay. Sure enough, when they finally came over, they were annoyed, claiming no one called them and questioning her account, despite her visibly injured face and her distraught child.
She'd wanted to report it, but didn't want him arrested, but they insisted they'd have to. So she shut it down. She knew how much worse that arrest would make matters for her family. She had told me how hard she’d been working from a shelter to get them all services after losing her job with the city and their housing during the pandemic, and about her daughter's time ventilated over the holidays.
I could clearly see how those officers, who looked like they now really cared, felt helpless as they left. She and I kept talking for a while, and without any slogans or policy jargon we reflected together on how cops don’t really do what we think they’re supposed to, which is to protect us from harm before it occurs, and often aren't able to give people what they need after harm has occurred, besides more violence. I gave her what I had on me and we parted ways when it was time for me to check back in.
It's worth mentioning here that a week later, March 16th, I spent all day sitting in a Zoom room so that I could tell that story to City Council and police officials at a hearing on public safety amidst budget planning for the next year. DefundNYPD had turned out a significant number of testimonies, along with teachers advocating to get police out of schools and other community members impacted by over-policing. I look back on the now-Speaker of the Council Adrienne Adams' concerned face as she lead the meeting and listened intently, and wonder how much actually sunk in. (Considering the new budget... not much.)
Below: Me racing against the clock to deliver the story and fiery demand, after about ten hours waiting through the hearing. You can watch the video online.
The next day after the incident, thankfully, was something besides politics. On March 10th I enjoyed my first performance in over a year with a cameo appearance in a recorded segment for Broken Box Mime Theater, who was conjuring up a delightful hybrid children's show for the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in Manhattan. I was still rattled from the day before, but checking in with my collaborative home base was rejuvenating, and went well!
On March 11th I took to my mostly-dark Twitch channel to do a little "streambanking" for Dianne Morales. I'd been so impressed by the release of new policy materials from her experienced activist staff I'd wanted to do a live review of them for people in my network. It was a fun way to drum up a little attention for the substance beneath a campaign people were still totally dismissing, and I got appreciative feedback from curious friends.
That weekend I got back to tabling, but split my efforts between projects. On Saturday, March 13th, I returned to Grand Army Plaza for my first shift on the new DefundNYPD tabling drive I was helping bottom-line for Central Brooklyn. The plan was for each NYC-DSA regional branch to pop up weekly tables through the spring to have tough conversations on the street and support campaign initiatives. That weekend we were engaging folks about the upcoming public safety hearing.
That Sunday, March 14th, though, I was back on the Tax The Rich grind uptown, where I was confronted with the literal embodiment of what we're up against. It was a somewhat slow shift, just getting going, when two middle-aged men met up at the corner before sauntering over with cigars. They read the sign and chuckled. "You want to tax us more? Why? We pay tons of taxes." The younger one joked, "You should tax his millions. He's really rich." The bearded gent laughed and shook his head in a way that reminded me of the Evil Corp CEO from Mr. Robot. His hype man wasn't kidding.
And so they took a seat on the upwind bench next to the table, blowing clouds of smoke my way. They chatted and people-watched, puffing away and commentating on my canvassing as I tried to ignore them and draw folks in. The nearer one kept spitting in my direction onto the sidewalk– probably some cigar-related salivary ritual, but nonetheless toward me. Eventually I came up with a pretty simple way to get rid of them, and enjoyed a relatively uneventful shift afterwards.
Below: After they were done teasing me and went back to their cigar talk, I came from behind the table, took this and told 'em, "Hey fellas hope ya don't mind, but this is a great shot. Really captures the issue." They were visibly uncomfortable. Good.
The last stretch of March was a bit rough. On top of everything going on in the world and my life, I found out that an uncle had unexpectedly passed away. It wasn't COVID, but that didn't make the loss any easier. That week I also got my second vaccine dose, and decided to skip the phonebanks I'd signed up for that week. The final weekend was the funeral.
I wasn't in any shape to be an effective phonebanker, but it was also around then that I started to really reflect on why I'd been so anxious for the shifts, and why I'd had such trouble with the occasional organizing phone calls in the weeks before. The pandemic and subsequent experiences has seemed to exacerbate some social and sensory difficulties I'd always kind of had but not been so disrupted by. I'm still working through the words people put to this.
But I still attended a couple more actions before the end of the month. First, on March 29th I helped represent Tax The Rich at a press conference in Washington Square Park organized for the Excluded Worker Fund, some of whose organizers had been on hunger strike for 14 days by that point. Hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable workers who'd lost income had been left out of all COVID relief thus far, and a sizeable portion of the taxes we were fighting to raise were going to be set aside for immediate relief.
Later that day I began a new task for Defund, keeping a calendar on NYPD events and happenings to track their outreach, important city council hearings, and other activity. Taking a two-week shift skimming the social media feeds and press briefs from police precincts, unions, and foundations was extremely illuminating. I would go on to learn about officer-only biker gangs, bizarre virtual reality afterschool outreach, the intentionally broken community policing meetings, and more.
Below: Outside the offices of Gov. Cuomo, Speaker Heastie, and Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins, whose three-way back-room budget negotiations is apparently... official standard operating procedure in NYS??
On March 31st there was a "Last Stand for Rent Relief" rally and march organized by several housing advocacy groups heading out from Foley Square. With the budget due in the first days of April, and with so many facing eviction, time was running out. The most interesting part of the rally was the multi-lingual chant orientation before the march took off. There were Mandarin and Spanish-speaking tenant groups that each took a turn to teach us, "Cancel rent," "End evictions," and other simple messages of solidarity. Masks made it a bit difficult to learn unfamiliar words perfectly, but the idea was wonderful.
We marched around downtown before a press conference and showdown outside the city government offices. We'd been given strips of paper to write what our back rent was, and tie it to the scaffolding outside, a visual that unfortunately didn't carry too far in the drizzling rain. Overall, though, it was a strong showing of widespread solidarity, and how deeply rooted the movement for housing justice is in ethnic communities.
--
I'd intended to get through this, and April's update, too, when I was trying to catch up last May, before things really got crazy and dropped off. It just wasn't meant to be. Don't worry, we'll get there...