Animals and Other Protagonists

Dear Friends,

Yesterday I attended a Hands Off! protest at Oakland City Hall with friends and family. The area in front of City Hall is called Frank Ogawa Plaza. Frank Ogawa was a civil rights leader and the first Japanese American on the Oakland City Council. The plaza is also called Oscar Grant Plaza, after the young man who was fatally shot at the Fruitvale BART station by BART police. It was in this plaza where Occupy Oakland protested for more than two weeks in 2011. Protests run deep in the marrow of Oakland. There was a General Strike in 1946 and Oakland longshoremen participated in the West Coast General Strike of 1934. And I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the Black Panther Party movement, which is Oakland born and bred.

But I wasn’t thinking about all that history when I entered Frank Ogawa Plaza. I was thinking about March 2008, when I saw that young senator from Illinois Barack Obama give a campaign speech in the plaza. This was a memorable event for two reasons. First, I had union clients who were pissed that he didn’t use local stagehands to set up his stage. Hillary always paid local union workers. But in March 2008, she had all the donors, and he had very few. Second, my four year old son found the whole affair to be overly crowded and tiresome so in his own protest, bit the leg of the nearest human. It happened to be my friend Melissa, so I was utterly mortified. We left soon after. From Obama to Trump is an unimaginable chasm that we are all struggling to straddle.

Now 21, that son accompanied the rest of the family to the Hands Off! protest yesterday and seemed unperturbed by the event. It makes sense: he’s now among the tallest of the participants, and it was pretty low key. The sound system - probably not union - was too quiet for the crowd to hear, and there was nowhere to march. That’s okay; we are testing our wings like new baby birds in the spring. As the days lengthen, the size of the crowds will increase and it won’t just be Boomers and Gen Xers who have done this before coming out to protest (Inshallah).

I’m happy to report we weren’t the only ones getting our protest legs out of winter storage (to mix metaphors). Over at my other blog, I documented protests in all 50 states. We are just getting started.

What else is going on? I’ve got some recommendations for you. On Thursday night, I saw The Friend, which is about a woman with a rent-controlled tiny NYC apartment who inherits a Great Dane from a friend. It’s a lovely movie. It’s also one that makes sense for a movie theater. You are not going to stream this at home because there are too many other More Important (tm) or More Explosive (tm) movies to watch there. If you don’t want to go to the theater, then just read the book, which I recommend even more.

Another good read: Open Throat by Henry Hoke. In this book, the protagonist is a queer mountain lion navigating the parks and people of Los Angeles. It’s a novel but also a prose poem? It reminded me of Lincoln in the Bardo in lyricism and sympathy and love for the not-human. Speaking of, here are the not-humans in my life preventing me from getting out of bed this morning.