Reflections on class, privilege, and the hidden biases that shape our society.
It’s 6:50am on Friday, November 1, 2024. It’s 45 degrees. I’m the last tent standing.
I’m the last anything standing, really. They brought trucks and bobcats and cleaned everything that wasn’t bolted down on 4 separate properties. That was surprising. All I ever saw was one nuisance sign on a property I didn’t own.
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But whatever. I truly have to pick my battles. And honestly, I’m thankful the stuff is cleaned up. They’ll just send me a bill.
This is the sign that they leave on these kinds of jobs:
“The personal property at this site constitutes a nuisance.”
That sentence is so deeply packed with meaning, history, and the values of a nation.
I’ve been really taken with recently learning that Hitler admired and was inspired by the Jim Crow laws of the United States. He was very impressed with how we handled segregation in our country.
This sign is a direct line from that same segregation history. “We have determined that YOUR personal belongings are a nuisance. And therefore, we have no choice but to throw them all away.”
The exact same personal property that they threw away here would be able to stay in the yard of someone they respected. And I’ve proved that very point by being here, writing this post in a tent on the land that was swept of every other tent yesterday.
This is the scene in front of me right now.
How is it that I’m allowed to keep my tent and my friends that actually need a tent can’t keep theirs?
I’ll tell you how: I’m a rich white man. That’s all it is. I can do the exact same thing a poor person is doing RIGHT NEXT to that poor person, and I’m treated differently.
I told them that I was holding a nonviolent civil disobedience protest. I guess that’s different. But do you think a poor person who did that would be treated with the same respect I was given? If they try that just once then they will take away that right from that person and everyone else. You can’t expect to be treated with the same respect as a homeless person. You just can’t.
I have resources and maybe they don’t want the headache. But they’ve sued me before. They have no problem with taking me to court.
There is only one reason I’m sitting here: I’m allowed to do things that poor people are not allowed to do on the exact same land at the exact same time.
I don’t believe they are making a conscious choice when they do things like this. Most racism and classism is instinctual. We are a species that has survived by instantly determining our in-groups and our out-groups. Even with my protesting and yelling, I’m part of the in-group. I look like them, I talk like them. They accept me instinctually. I mean look at these guys:
Those could be my brothers. We’re balding white men with authority. Of course we’re going to have a connection. I’m just that leftist brother who went off the rails after getting that literature degree in college.
The other people here are dirty, long-haired, and dirt-poor. Instinctually, they are felt as different. They instinctively feel like losers. Like people that need to get their shit together. That’s the instinctual feeling. The truth is so much more complicated.
We need to help educate people that this is happening all the time. We all are doing it. It never happens more than during a presidential election. Half the country is our in-group, and half the country is our out-group. And politicians are more than happy to help stoke the fire of that instinctual divide in hopes of gaining more power.
Most importantly, we must not make it some sort of condemnation. We can’t create a new way of separating ourselves. WE ALL DO IT. It has been a critically important part of what it means to be human.
Now we have to realize that we are in a new era. We live in an era where we are ALL the in-group. Even people we disagree with. Like it or not, we are now a global nation. There is only one nation – the world nation. In order to survive and continue to progress we must learn that we are all in this together and we must help all people of Earth to thrive and succeed in the ways that are meaningful for them.
Will people continue to hurt us? Yes. Will we continue to hurt other people? Yes. But we’ve got to start practicing global acceptance and global uniting. And the way we start practicing that is by beginning to understand the neighbor you think is a racist or a communist. You start by dropping those words. They only divide us and further separate us. Stop calling people names. Just start talking to them.