Who We Are, Policing Public Space, and Covid 19, Plague Journal

Making the best of a crazy moment. 

Ivy Arce May 4 · 

Yesterday this image was on the tv

Lisa Guido @lisaguido · True words on the spot Jill Nelson was arrested for chalking “Trump = Plague”, 162nd and Broadway. An award winning writer with a piece of chalk, but let’s face it, a black woman speaking a bit of truth, and the police could not abide it. #NYC #nyccoronavirus photo @ApertureDelta

"New Alternatives May 8 at 12:11 PM · 

Thanks to the people of Bay Ridge Fight Back who collected all these items for our client’s soon-to-born baby and to New Alt volunteer Ben Shepard who delivered them."

Missing seeing all my friends in the village. those such as doris who i see every sunday, so many others... i love this pic of the legendary Doris Diether

Ed Wolf May 4 · 

37 years ago I became a Shanti volunteer, a “buddy” to someone with AIDS. He was a loner, estranged from family, had KS and PCP and was really afraid. He told me the thing he most enjoyed doing was playing volleyball. There was so much conflicting information then, like now, so much uncertainty, like now, so many questions about the future, like now. He became a patient on Ward 5B at SF General, where I would visit him. He was the 19th patient to die there. Afterwards I cleaned out his apartment and found this photo of him. His name was Ed too.

Ann N in the Times. Photo by Jackie Rudin. 

No arrests at the Gov's office when Make the Road shows up on Friday to speak out. Two days later activists with Reclaim Pride make a similar claim on space and are ticketed. Doesn't smell right to me. 

Andy Humm

May 6 at 2:43 AM

Ann and me about this week's struggle with Franklin Graham and Bill de Blasio on Gay USA as we go live on Facebook at 2:30 PM Wednesday. Type "MNN" on the FB search bar and "Manhattan Neighborhood Network - MNN" will come up. Click on that to see show live--or wait until its regularly scheduled telecasts.

Fly Orr - Spring Fevah !! Missing the Rabbits of St Paul :: and other stuff ...... x

Seth Tobocman.

Comic about Healthcare workers by Annabel Heckler on WWE3 blog site https://worldwar3illustrated-blog.tumblr.com/

"#Repost @somasnakeoil (with @report.for.insta)

..Sex worker protocols: Our intention is a harm reduction strategy to decrease the probability of Covid19 spread. We advise abstinence from in person sex work, but understand survival workers don’t always have that luxury, especially without government support. We encourage our community to be Covid Safe Providers & ask the same of clients.

1. Clean Space. Alcohol/bleach for non-porous surfaces, including handles and faucets. Change sheets. Wash hands. Street workers keep tent flap open.

2. Client wear mask. SW’r wear mask & gloves.

3. Client remove shoes, clothing, keys, phone at door & shower. You could take temperature.

4. No kissing. It’s sexy to skip it.

5. Dick wash. Men touch their dicks. We can wash them for them. If you have water you could use Hibiclens & warm water. Suggest Perineal spray for street workers.

6. Hand jobs. Make them lay down & stay down. Their face should stay in their mask.

7. Blow jobs. Only remove mask for time it takes.

8. Sex. Doggie. Reverse cowgirl. Positions that keep your face away from their face.

9. Rimming (mouth on anus) may spread covid. Virus in feces may enter mouth. Condoms & dental dams can reduce contact with saliva or feces, especially during oral/anal.

10. Wash before & after. Sex toys can be cleaned in the dishwasher, with soap/water or with alcohol/cavacide.

11. Dommes: Approach as a fetish. Wear N95, gloves, gown and eye protection. Stay away from client’s face. Keep in mind porous materials like leather hoods will hold the virus for a lengthy duration.

12. Street workers ask clients to keep car windows down-less contained air. Have them wear a mask. Remove your mask only for blow job.

13. Disinfect car handles/ steering wheel with use or when someone new enters a car you are in. Street based workers use napkin or sleeve to not touch car handles.

Traces of COVID have been found in semen, raising the possibility that the virus might be sexually transmitted. This does not constitute concrete evidence. Please use condoms til we know more. Feel free to reach out to @Dominatrixesagainstdonaldtrump

@swop_sacramento

or @the_sidewalk_project for mutual aid resourc" 

Shannon and her sisters. 

After an online teaching training last week, a friend sent an email with the following quote:

“All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within its confines” – Haruki Murakami.

Every day we breathe in the air of what has happened to this country.

We learn more about who we are, about ourselves in crisis.

After 9/11, we gave away civil liberties that we have never gotten back, my friend Jessica said the other day.  The mayor of New York suggested we get back to work, back to shopping, while cancer creating dust floated in the air.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been riding bikes, teaching online, writing, union meetings, trying to defend workers, and watching plans go by the wayside.

Plan after plan in flux.

 Each day brings more news, reports about numbers, ebbing and slowing, test results, summer plans that have come and gone.

The ways the planet is coping with this.

Carbon emissions are down, along with travel.

Each night, we cook and watch movies together.

I travel with Tony Bourdain to Vietnam and Hong Kong, thinking about the world, my usual impulse to get the hell out of town thwarted, and what’s happened to our divided country.

Toward the end of  Mike Mills’ 20^th Century Woman, Jimmy Carter delivers his Crisis of confidence speech, suggesting we work together.

The energy crisis will not be resolved if we only think of ourselves says the president.

“Ten days ago, I had planned to speak to you again about a very important subject -- energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you: Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?”

Carter sees a crisis of confidence, of self-interest, a malaise.

Instead of wagging the tail or bombing Iran, he sacrificed his presidency.

He’s the only president of my lifetime to do so.

Four decades later, his message feels prophetic.

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems,” says Mahatma Gandhi.

Each year, the gap seems wider.

Today, self-interest is undermining efforts to cope with the current health crisis.

AIDS activist Sean Strub writes:

“The President and Chris Christie are now framing the rushed, ill-advised and almost certainly mistaken “reopening” of the economy as an admirable and necessary national sacrifice, likening the certain increased death toll to deaths in WWII, in order to “preserve our way of life”.  This is revolting spin of the most craven and cynical order. This is what it means to run a country “like a business”. Trump is determining who will live or die based on what different parts of our society contribute to the bottom line of the “company”, aka the United States. Old people are at the end of their usefulness as consumers, they aren’t in the workforce, “producing”, and end-of-life care is expensive. Let’s let ‘em go.  Poor people cost us in services and benefits, let’s let them go as well. And people with serious underlying health condifions, get rid of them quick before they become a “public charge” and drain tax dollars.  The fact that, in the US, black and brown people, women and queer and trans people disproportionately live in poverty and suffer chronic health conditions is just a wild coincidence, right?  Racism, sexism, etc., or any devaluation of parts of our society clearly has nothing to do with it. Obviously.  The casualness with which this suspiciously eugenics-like “cleansing” has been accepted and supported by so many is disturbing.”

We find out who we are.

Some  coordinate.

Some respect differences.

Some call for reasoned analysis.

Jeremiah Johnson reminds us

“As we all look for places to direct our displaced anger, please make sure you are directly shaming the politicians and powerful individuals who got/are getting us into this mess more than you are shaming individual social distancing behaviors. It will be WAY more effective.

And please be careful about advocating for overly authoritarian enforcement of social distancing behaviors- that tends to work out very poorly for marginalized and disenfranchised communities.”

Yet, increasingly, we are seeing a policing of public space.

Ahmaud Arbery,  killed in Georgia for jogging while black.

“81% New York coronavirus-social-distancing-enforcement-arrests have taken place among communities of color.

On May first, a group of cyclists and cars circled the governor’s office for #FreeThemAll Fridays.

Make the Road shows up to speak to the press.   

Two days later activists with Reclaim Pride make a similar claim on space, organizing a press conference on 1^st and 16^th Street.

Police swarm and Ann Northrop is given a summons.

Andy Humm writes.
“I went to cover a press conference by Reclaim Pride on Sunday, pressing their case that the city and state and Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital must never again partner with the bigoted Franklin Graham or any like group. It turned into a bigger story: using an executive order by Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio sent the police out to bust up the physically distanced press conference citing a danger to public health. They issued a summons to organizer Ann Northrop. They declared that all outdoor First Amendment expression is now forbidden--an order that must not stand, says civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel. And the city is still unable to explain why a physically distanced press conference is a threat and lining up to go into Trader Joe's is not.”

Rhys Williams follows,

This is just Rudy Redux post 9/11 -- you can gather to shop or go to work -- any other purpose requires a permit.

But others disagree on the feed.

What a shame, one tells me.

What a shame.

Its not a shame to disagree.

Activists rarely ever agree on tactics or strategy.

Sometimes we talk it through.

Hopefully finding some common cause.

But as Carter learned, this space is often elusive.

Public space for the people.

Lets not police each other.

People are doing their best.

Many of us have no other place to go.

The freedoms we enjoy are precious.

On April 16th, Jill Nelson left her house to do some errands, stopping to chalk a message at 162^nd and Broadway.

“Trump=Plague” and found herself in handcuffs.  

Those on the Transportation Alternatives List commented,

Ed Ravin noting:

“Chalking does not seem to meet the standards for NYS Penal law's

"graffiti" section (see below) which requires the "intent to damage"

property.  Given how easily chalk comes off, it's arguable that no

"damage" was intended.

And yes, it's always been this way, cops have been doing things

like this ever since there were cops. We're just (thankfully)

paying more attention.

-- Ed

------

S 145.60 Making graffiti.

1. For purposes of this section, the term "graffiti" shall mean the

etching, painting, covering, drawing upon or otherwise placing of a mark

upon public or private property with intent to damage such property.

2. No person shall make graffiti of any type on any building, public

or private, or any other property real or personal owned by any person,

firm or corporation or any public agency or instrumentality, without the

express permission of the owner or operator of said property.”

Dulcie Canton, who originally posted about this, wrote:

“4 cops, detained in the 33rd precinct holding cell for hours, she and he husband are 60+, very high risk for COVID19. It looks like the entire thing was thrown out because her husband works with the university:(.”

We learn who we are in these moments, for better or worse.

While some are looking to their own needs,

others are rising to the occasion for others.

At New Alternatives for LGBT youth, we’ve been coordinating getting food and survival supplies to people all over the city, connecting volunteers, supplies, and services, delivering thousands of meals across the city.

On Weds, the teenager and I made our way from the Gowanus to Bay Ridge, up to the Bronx, dropping off supplies.

“New Alternatives writes:

“Thanks to the people of Bay Ridge Fight Back who collected all these items for our client’s soon-to-born baby and to New Alt volunteer Ben Shepard who delivered them.”

Mutual aid is everywhere.

My friend Michel Coconis is one of many involved in the practice.  He writes:

“My mutual aid activities have included (or so I believe):

1. Trained as a volunteer with AARP and making and taking calls to folks who want them

2. Dropping off food and diapers at Little Food Pantries in several locations in Columbus Ohio

3. Delivering food for LifeCareAlliance (meals on Wheels)

4. Putting masks together with our local Emergency Management

5. Getting on Nextdoor app and driving folks to the store or shopping for them

6. Putting stuffed animals in the windows for walkers/passersby to notice each day

7. Reading newspapers and magazines to ppl who cannot get them from the library or other access

I'm actually not sure which of these is technically mutual aid - three came from a FB group in Columbus and two from next-door app but others were responses to requests for volunteers.

I got 2 nurses to go to NYC to volunteer and helped with their gas and food since I could not go or be useful myself.

I have been to one driveby rally on releasing ppl from Ohio's prisons and jails - we could do much better at that …”

Still self interest is rarely far from the scene.

Peter Staley writes:

“I know many are saying COVID will change things forever, creating a new normal. But I'm reminded of the post-plague years in the U.S. (starting in 1996), when the LGBT community pivoted away from AIDS before you could blink, almost as if it had never happened. The collective pain can create its own kind of backlash, where a "return to normal" floods in quickly to help everyone forget (at least for a while). Sadly, I'm pretty sure that about a year after we get a vaccine, we'll go right back to burning up the planet.”

Over and over, these crisis help us find out who we are.

Riding around town, we talk about this moment, wearing masks, wondering what the future has in store, as jobs disappear, and we sit with ourselves, without our distractions.  Its not easy.

On Mother’s Day, I wrote:

Happiness is over rated. To all the unhappy, the mothers, those who couldn't or wouldn't or shouldn't, those who did and were unhappy or even relatively ok about it... but to the unhappy...or moderately happy, I salute you. Happy unhappy.

The little one and I read some War and Peace, enjoying participating in, #TolstoyTogether reading group:

“Prince Andrei cried in a high, squeaky voice. “Ah, dear heart, lately it's become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good…”

I think a lot of us feel like that.

Poetry in line after line as this story about being alive and fighting.

Chapters vacillate between stories of war and human endeavor, peace and conflict.

A bit of peace in the war, war in domestic solitude, some yin in yang, an ever-evolving interplay between the two dancing throughout the chapters.

After reading, I usually follow the #TolstoyTogether feed of writers and readers commenting:

@aliontas tweets   

“The great math Tolstoy does in W&P is to hand the character every variable but one, thereby making happiness impossible—for how desperately do we suffer for the little that remains unattainable. That ache is what reminds us we’re human #TolstoyTogether @APublicSpace.”

Mom and I walk through her garden.

Laughing about being alive, looking at her flowers,

Her garden, ever a bit of solace.

She was born during the Depression.

This is just another challenge.

The daffodils and paeonies are thriving.

She’s ok.

All Sunday, we talk about what happiness can mean in the face of setbacks.

A few of us have a zoom call later in the day for our weekly Activist Informed Reading Group Session.  This week on What You Heard is True.

“I hope you're loving Carolyn Forche as much as I am..I also have mothers/fathers day events scheduled for today but will see you at 3pm,” writes Catherine before we meet.

“A prompt of what I'm loving so far is her descriptive language.
No clichés here and in fact some wonderful engagement in visual storytelling.

And I love this James Baldwin quote in the opener:

For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul - the people utterly indispensable for one's journey. - James Baldwin

…we've all encountered these people, and following our instincts to share our lives with them makes all the difference.

" A sea wind passed through the screens, lifting some papers into the air and sailing them to the floor."  

We all walk through history.

Sometimes we try to dodge it.

Sometimes a stranger knocks on our door asking us to take a trip.

In this case, Leonel asks Carolyn to join him on a journey through the history El Salvador, just as a US intervention is about to transform its trajectory.

A revolutionary comes to a poet.

Don’t worry I’m going to teach you Virgil says to Dante in The Divine Comedy.

I’ll lead you through hell.

Perhaps through the arts, a truth will be revealed? 

Can a poet be a historian?

Har far can we go inside of ourselves? 

We all grow with others.

How did you pick this book is a singular question for book group?

It was a year ago, that Catherine’s mom was asked to go to her office.

Catherine came along and there she found the book, read the reviews.

It’s a time for poets, says Catherine.

Things are tenuous.

What do we do as resisters?

There are lessons to be learned from poets, questions about democracy and decency and human pain.

Carolyn has an encounter with a stranger who shows her his country,

with its silences and pain,

below the senses.

There she sees hospitals and mothers of the disappeared.

Those who lose their minds in solitary confinement.

And those left behind, wondering what happened.

Maybe it changes her whole life… we all have someone who guides us.

We all take risks.

How much risk is worth it?

All Mother’s day, I think of my great grandmother who lost a son almost eight decades prior to her departure in 1981 at the age of 99 years young.

She grieved for that child all her life.

If you stick around long enough, you encounter losses and pain.

We all encounter strangers, those who ask us to look beneath the surface.

Below the senses.

They teach us who we really are.

What is our current moment telling us?

It’s revealing a lot.