11:05 p.m. and the helicopters are still constant overhead.  I occupied a chair in my dining room for most of the day while logged into my work e-mail, opting not to go into the office. The building I work in was in ‘secure mode’ all day as a preventative measure for dual purposes, a potential strike of the Bay Area Maintenance Contractors, directly impacting our building, within the larger context of the May 1st Occupy Oakland activities.  I did not want to cross the picket line and be caught carrying on with ‘business as usual,’ and sat at home with my guilt and passive support instead.

A variety of tabs were open from my browser so I could safely monitor the photos, tweets, and myriad perspectives of the Occupy activities throughout the day.  Incidentally, there was also a bomb threat at the elementary school in Virginia where one of my nieces and two of my nephews attend school.  I caught that going by from a Facebook update.  The gist of of the Facebook update was that it was the stupidest day ever.  The worst part, from the kids’ perspective, was that several kids were evacuated without being given the chance to collect their cell phones.  The equivalent of losing a limb, essentially.  Turns out that it was only a threat, but we all know you can’t take those things lightly.

This day has a long history in the U.S., dating back to 1864 when there was a nation-wide movement that involved workers agitating for an eight-hour work day.   As summarized in an article titled May Day’s Radical History, the Occupy actions planned for today are tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement.

Occupy Wall Street in NYC had its own page of activities, and the tag line on the site reads ‘OWS Stands in Solidarity with the Calls for a Day Without the 99%.’  There was a coordination cheat sheet and opportunities to participate in free market systems, learn-ins, free university to actualize the education we want to see, and an invitation to 1,000 guitarists  to join Occupy Guitarmy and rock out during a march from Bryant Park to Union Square.  There was even a suggested “vacation note” you could use for your Twitter, Facebook, or personal website that read: May Day is a day for the 99% to celebrate the value of their work and lives. I have taken to the streets, and so should you!

The Occupy Oakland camp set up a website purely for today’s activities under the banner of May 1st General Strike – Bay Area May Day Clearinghouse, imploring no work, no school, no business as usual.  Activities were stationed around anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, and anti-gentrification in three decentralized locations throughout Oakland with the goal that the different groups would converge in one massive march to a rally later in the day.  From what I read via the Occupy Oakland stream of tweets, this was largely accomplished, albeit with some riot-clad police, tear gas, and even a tank heading down Broadway mid-afternoon.  Links at the bottom of this Clearinghouse page take you to similar events organized in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and even a link to STRIKE EVERYWHERE, a global general strike.  If the media or talking heads of any description, political or otherwise, want to portray these activities as the tag line from Scooby Doo, aka if it wasn’t for you meddling kids, it would be less than accurate.

Time magazine awarded Person of the Year 2011 to The Protestor.  Between the cascade of revolutions in the Middle East that began with an average citizen setting himself on fire in Tunisia in response to police bureaucracy getting in the way of his livelihood (while the extravagances of the dictatorship were openly displayed) to the dominoes that continued to fall into Europe and across the Atlantic to the U.S. this revolution is being televised, and tweeted.

The methods and factions of the Occupy movement splinter off from the unifying sentiment of frustration at economic inequality and corporate greed.  There’s no easy way to take on big institutions, right?  Banging on the doors of Bank of America and Wells Fargo branches and terrifying the onsite staff is one form of expression, I suppose, though it isn’t my style.  That would be the bottom up approach.  The top down approach seems to look more like the Buffet Rule, which would amount to no household making more than $1 million each year would pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle class family pays.  Sounds pretty good to me, and there seem to be more than a few well-heeled, deep-pocketed millionaires that are okay with that also.  But neither the bottom up or the top down approach have gotten much traction.  So the faceless masses of Occupy keep organizing creative disruptions until something gives.

Anarchist episodes of violence are to be expected.  That seems to always be the case with any rally or march.  And the media loves that stuff, so unfortunately the majority of news-consumers get a stilted view of how these creative disruptions play out.  Occupy discussions can easily polarize a dinner party conversation and a casual Facebook exchange can turn ugly.   Ultimately, I think the discussions taking place because of the Occupy movement are a good thing.  There are no easy answers, but at least all of the -isms are under scrutiny.  A new umbrella term that encapsulates the Occupy movement pretty efficiently is the word corporatocracy.  It is so new that WordPress is suggesting it isn’t a word with a red squiggly underline.

I support the Occupy movement and consider myself part of the 99%.  On April 5th, I had the dizzying, life-altering experience of appearing in a court of law to have my Chapter 13 bankruptcy petition reviewed.  The mortgage I held for a condo in Virginia was upside down with no hope of recovery any time soon, and the rent received on a monthly basis for that property was $400 shy of my obligations.  That was the math for 4+ years.  When I tried to re-mortgage, BofA couldn’t help me because they viewed my condo as a second home, so the lending conditions were more stringent and out of my reach.  On top of other debts, I was up against the wall by last July.  Numbers fell in my head trying to find a way to fit like a game of Tetris when I tried to go to sleep at night.

When I met with legal counsel last December, the lawyer assured me that unless I was an heiress to an inheritance or planned on winning the lottery, I was never going to get out from under the debt.  In situations like mine, bankruptcy is meant to offer a fresh start.  It was a forced march to get through the mountain of paperwork required of the process.  For once I was grateful for my pack rat-tendencies.  I half expected that upon checking in at the court room where I was required to swear in under a prominent Department of Justice seal, that they would hand me a sweater with a big scarlet letter on the front.  It was all very formulaic, and the trustee really was on the side of justice, an advocate for the debtors when needed as much as she was an arbiter in search of clarity for correctly filed petitions.

As a prerequisite to declaring bankruptcy, I had to take an online credit counseling course that should be MANDATORY for everyone graduating from high school.  Unless you grow up in a household where money management is overt, the credit card industry has the intoxicating ability to eat you alive.  It kind of reminds me of a response Ricki Lee Jones provided to a question about her stint with drugs.  She said, “The funny thing about drugs is you’re doing them until (pregnant pause) one day they’re doing you.”

It is taking me a while to re-story around this.  When the lawyer saw me fretting back in December, he asked about my reservations.  I told him I was never going to do something like this, I am the responsible one, the good girl.  He re-asserted the stark truth about how I’d never get out from under the debt, and said, ‘Trust me, the banks don’t have these issues.’  It became clear that it was unsustainable and that the life of an indentured servant wasn’t for me.  Now, I can’t wait to have a bonfire to burn statements kept on file for years.

The RSS feeds streaming through the Occupy Oakland site tonight said things like, ‘Total civil unrest in Oakland tonight, cops and copters all over, occupiers everywhere, scattered arrests, police not in control.’   One article I read about pre-May Day activities on April 30 turned toward vandalism in the Mission District, San Francisco, noted, ‘Whether Occupy identifies with these rioters or not, these rioters identify with Occupy.’

There are many ways to identify with this movement, even if you don’t agree with some of its manifestations.  The quick to judge, casual observer may err on the side of saying something like, ‘if they have time to be out on the streets, they have time to get a job.’  If that observer gets their news from a major news network, stretching that perspective to consider that perhaps the sensationalized bits might be the Agent Provocateur instead of the Anarchist might be a good push-up for the brain.  This movement has many faces, and the anarchists are a visible minority.

It is miserable that small businesses have been damaged, and that city budgets have been stretched to manage the disruptions to business (and busy-ness) as usual.  As noted, I did not take to the streets and my conscience wrestled with whether or not I should be out on the streets doing something.

But then I went to my yoga class tonight.  Yoga meaning union, the individual soul with the universal spirit.  And right there in the class with me was Angela Davis, professor emerita UC Santa Cruz, and one of the hallmark nationally prominent activists from the 1960s.    The East Bay Express featured an article on Angela Davis and Grace Lee Boggs titled, “Angela Davis and Grace Lee Boggs Ponder Activism in the Age of Occupy,” in tandem with a recent speaking engagement at UC Berkeley to kick off the Empowering Women of Color Conference.  The article explores ‘protest organizing’ versus ‘visionary organizing,’ and explores what revolution means in this day and age.  Ms. Davis was gracefully following the instruction from one pose to the next instead of standing at a podium in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland.  This fact gave me pause to consider that there is even more to re-story, and that re-story can include visionary organizing AND downward dogs.