Alan’s got a lovely piece up at Clear View Blog (digging his jaunty-angled question: what would MLK, Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson think about being put on U.S. postage stamps?) that points to the connections between big-L Love and the effort to, in King’s words, “defeat evil systems.”
Compassion and militancy. Neither can substitute for the other. If you’ve got militancy but don’t practice compassion, your friends and comrades — the people upon whom you most rely, politically and personally — prob’ly won’t enjoy being around you. Not in the long term, anyway. And if you’ve got compassion but no critical analysis of “evil systems,” or meaningful program to defeat them, you are, as Ryan points out, utopian.
Combine the two, compassion and militancy, and you’ll get something powerful. But you’ll also get problems.
Frederick Douglas famously asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” We might do well to extend the same skepticism to today’s hallowed, lovey-dovey vacation day.
Beneath the hype, MLK day can serve as a reminder that people who advance the fight for radical liberation, using their own compassion and militancy, are undoubtedly risking their lives.
So if you’re among them, thank you for your courage. May the earth continue to bless you with beauty every day. May you sometimes have a sweet picnic by the lake.
Hey friends! Thank you for the rich discussion in the last post, on communicating with our elders. I’m always so humbled and grateful for the open, honest reflections that people share in this space. And that’s part of why this weekly practice of blogging continues.
Speaking of practices, I’m on a mission to cultivate more traditions and rituals in my life. Little anchors and measuring sticks for relating to change, and the passage of time, in a slightly different way. (Note: I love the weekly butcher-shop ritual described in this gorgeous essay by a dynamic/post-/questioning vegan; link via Napaquetzalli and Ernesto.)
One ritual that I’ve been recalling lately dates back to 2008/early 2009, when I lived in Central Square, back in Cambridge. My friend Jen turned me on to this weekly program on an independent radio station. “The Secret Spot.” Old-school and R&B jams: from Erykah Badu to Teddy Pendergrass, D’Angelo, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Lauryn Hill, Al Green. I LOVED The Secret Spot. And on Saturday nights, I would light some candles in the living room, turn down the lights, cozy up with a blanket in my favorite armchair, and listen. Sing along, too, if the apartment was empty (which it often was — this being Saturday night, when my fellow twentysomething housemates were typically engaged in more age-appropriate activities).
This week Kloncke is gonna be pretty foto heavy. Because I’ve been spending time in pretty places. Thinking a lot about land, too, and my connection to it (or estrangement from it).
Here, some shots from an amazing afternoon at Panther Beach, on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. Some of the best of Northern California, in its own way, I think. One of the things I love most about spots like this is the visible age and marks of motion in the stone. The oldness of the cliffs, and the patterns of waterwear and erosion. Makes me feel patient and slow and humbled. Kind of like being among elder redwoods.
[Today, former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to 2 years in prison, with 146 days already served, for the involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant. The Grant case marked the first time in California’s history that a peace officer was tried for murder.]
Whereas
We as women, transgender people, two-spirit people, queers, gender-oppressed people, and allies of the Bay Area mourn the loss of Oscar Grant;
Whereas we recognize that this young man was just one of countless victims of police violence;
Whereas we understand and experience police repression, particularly in poor, queer, and working-class communities of color;
Whereas we know that police violence both enables and enacts rape, brutalization, and degradation;
Whereas police violence compounds the dangers we face in domestic violence, sex trafficking, and homophobic and transphobic hate crimes;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our disabilities, addictions, and mental illnesses;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our skin color, sexualities, style of dress and speech, gender identities, religious practices, and nations of origin;
Whereas police violently enforce our subservience to an economy that enriches elites, while slaughtering, starving, sickening, and stealing from us as workers, child-rearers, and culture creators;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to violently crush our efforts toward self-determination, from queer social spaces to workplace strikes;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to kill or capture our leaders and heroes, like the recently deceased political prisoner Marilyn Buck;
Whereas police are employed to do as they are ordered;
Whereas police violence comes 10% from individual bigotry and improper training, and 90% from a capitalist state system designed to protect property, not people;
Whereas such a property-focused police system, controlled by the rich and influential, enacts and supports gender-based and sexual violence;
And Whereas such a system can never be adequately reformed, based as it is in the fundamental inequality borne of a patriarchal capitalist system:
We maintain compassion for individual police officers who both experience and inflict suffering; who face and enforce mortal danger.
We vow, in the effort to end sexist violence throughout the world, to eradicate the police system of the United States as we know it; and to transcend the misogynist capitalist system that demands this type of policing.
We undertake this mission with no hatred in our hearts toward individual police officers or those who support the police system.
We accept this responsibility out of love for all people, and the unquenchable desire for universal freedom and equality.
In the service of this calling, we will sing, strike, fuck, fight, rest, write, rebel, and rebuild until we achieve liberation for all beings.
I probably won’t be updating Kloncke for the next week or so, and that’s because, for my second time, I’ll be joining the Faithful Fools in their annual Street Retreat: seven days and nights living, sleeping, and reflecting in the streets of the Tenderloin neighborhood, in San Francisco.
Coming to terms with the street retreat as a reflective and humanizing practice has been difficult for me. To be honest, I still feel significant resistance to the idea. Fortunately, though, over the past few weeks I’ve been able to sit with this resistance and discomfort (a time when the dhamma practice has come in handy), talk with friends and other Fools about it, and work through it in a positive way.
Before getting into my reservations and reconciliations, here’s a nice, basic description of what the street retreat, from fellow Fool intern Josh Mann:
Starting this Saturday, I will be participating in my first week-long Street Retreat through the Faithful Fools. I’ll be leaving my money, cell phone, and keys behind and taking a sleeping bag and backpack. I plan to sleep outside and eat mostly in soup kitchens, and I anticipate a lot of searching for public bathrooms. Twice a day, I’ll be meeting up with eight to ten other people to reflect on the experience. And, some of us will be sleeping as a group.
Part of the mission of the Faithful Fools is to “participate in shattering myths about those living in poverty” and to help people discover what is common to all of us regardless of our economic standing or housing status. As a Street Retreat participant, I am asked to reflect throughout the retreat on what keeps me separate from others as well as what connects me.
Ever since my first term in college, I have felt compelled to engage the social issues of poverty and hunger, and I expect that this retreat will help me better understand these issues including the way that public policies, laws, and urban planning affect people with little to no money.
At the same time, the founders of the Faithful Fools put great emphasis on the fact that we are not pretending to be homeless. I will begin the retreat knowing that it has a specific end time on Saturday, October 30th. It also seems important for me to acknowledge that I go as an able-bodied, college-educated U.S. citizen who is white, male, and straight, which will no doubt be a factor in both how other people respond to me and how I experience the streets.
Please keep me in your thoughts this week. I seek to know my own heart, and I need all of the help I can get. I also invite you to participate with me in some way or another wherever you are. I recommend setting aside a little time one day to wander and see who and what you encounter. The spirit of this retreat as I understand it is to meet more deeply the people and places that we sometimes hurry past.
So there’s a little bit of background. As you can see, the retreat is not a study or experiment, nor is it a gimmick for “playing homeless.” The spirit is one of renunciation. We wouldn’t fast in order to “understand what it’s like to be a starving person,” but in order to push and expand our own views of the world we inhabit right now, as we are. It’s not about appropriating or trying on someone else’s experience (the simplistic idea of “standing in someone else’s shoes”), but about peeling off the layers of ourselves, the skins thickened by routine and dualism, that pervert our own views of reality — including our views of ourselves.
What had been bugging me so much, I think (and it disturbed me so strongly that I very nearly backed out of the whole thing), wasn’t the idea of the street retreat itself, but its purported connections to mechanisms of social transformation. I’ve talked on this blog before about what I see as the dangers of believing in a method for changing the world one mind at a time. This approach rightly observes that human social “systems” are made up of individual people, but wrongly induces that these systems are therefore merely the sum of their parts, and that persistent hearts-and-minds education can eventually (through influencing voters and “those in power”) translate into large-scale fundamental social improvements.
I disagree with this approach for various reasons; now isn’t the time to go into ’em. Suffice it to say, now that I’ve managed to decouple the reflective, community side of the street retreat from positive claims about its structural effectiveness, I feel a bit calmer about participating.
One common concern about street retreats is that we are “taking away resources” from people who need them, by eating in soup kitchens and sometimes sleeping in shelters (if we can get in). I sympathize with the concern here, but the way I see it is: we do far more to support poverty and homelessness through our everyday complacency with the capitalist system than we could possibly do by individually taking a couple dozen free meals. The scarcity (of beds, less frequently of food) is artificial.
Another frequent worry, especially from my dad: YOU ARE GOING TO GET YOURSELF KILLED. IT IS DANGEROUS OUT THERE.
Don’t worry, papa. (And others.) From my observation over the past year, there is little danger of random violence on the streets of the Tenderloin. The main types of violence we see here are (1) interpersonal violence among acquaintances, (2) low-level police violence in the form of harassment and enabling rape culture, and (2) structural violence, like the abovementioned artificial scarcity that keep families homeless while apartment buildings sit vacant for years, or the racist, sexist, homophobic criminalization of mental illness and drug addiction.
I guess both of these ‘responses,’ intended to allay fears, kind of sidestep the issues by pointing out how they are dwarfed by larger problems. Well, that’s sort of how it goes for me, at the moment. We’ll see if any more insights come during the week.
Wish me luck! I will try to log some time on the computers in the public library, but the lines are generally long, the connections slow, and the time limits brief.
I wanted to write and tell you that directly but I can’t find any contact info. So if you are reading this, please know that I am sending you all kinds of mental hugs and mental bows and mental incense and mental plantains (yum!), and thanking you so very deeply for your work and inspiration.
As Maia at The Jizo Chronicles also notes, in US media, the deafening silence around Pakistan’s tragedy continues.
Death and disaster are a part of life, of course, but catastrophes are compounded by structural and personal oppression, and a lack of self-determination.
Tomorrow is my birthday, friends, and a historic birthday it will be.
Not only because of sea otters (more on that in a second), but because — and I’m fairly certain on this — it will be the first cold-weather birthday of my entire life.
August in Sacramento, Barcelona, Agra (India), New Orleans, Boston…see a theme here? HEAT.
I love heat! Ungodly, crazy heat! The kind of unmitigated heat that gives everyone an excuse to be sweaty and dirty all day long. Where is this heat??? What happened to summer?
As evidenced by the above photo, in San Francisco we have no excuse to get all sticky and grimy. We have sweater weather. Sweater, scarf, wool sock and hat weather, plus a jacket for going outside.
Luckily, my record birthday low will be tempered somewhat by an overnight flight to Massachusetts. (To volunteer at/attend the Zen Peacemakers’ symposium on Western Socially Engaged Buddhism — remember that?) At least I will be traveling toward warmth!
Additionally, it will be an awesome birthday because before my 10pm flight there will be kayaking with sea otters and human friends at the Elkhorn Slough, a coastal wetland reserve near Monterey.
Why does any of this matter to you? It doesn’t, really, except to say that I will be traveling a lot in August (to hot places, hooray!), and will take a break from blogging. Those of you who’ve been following for a while know this is not an uncommon occurrence! I often disappear for months at a time, with no warning.
Anyway, in my opinion, with a mindful blogging praxis it’s good to get out of the internet for a while. Stretch the legs.
I am so grateful to all of y’all for reading, commenting, sharing links, and supporting me (and each other) through this little project over the last couple of years. It’s been an honor and a lot of fun to build and dialogue with you, and I hope some of the stuff you’ve found here has proven useful in your own life.
Blue lake swimming, mighty pines, tenacious wildflowers, climbing til it hurts, cloud-level vistas, gourmet chili cooking, 10 lovely friends in the High Sierras. Count me bug-bitten and grateful.
I grew up in Northern California, but I’ve never before visited Yosemite. What can I say? – my parents are not the camping type. Like, at all. The one time we went camping as a family (I must have been 11 or 12) it was because my dad was officiating this couple’s wedding, which was a camping wedding in the Santa Monica mountains. A medieval-themed camping wedding. I remember they made my dad wear this purple velvet robe costume and one of those huge white starched frilly collars, even though it was like 90 degrees out. People and their weddings, I tell you.
Anyway, everybody slept in tents overnight, and by morning two things had happened pertaining to the Loncke-Spitz crew. One, my dad’s deafening snoring earned him the nickname “Judge Dredd” among all the wedding guests. Two, at about 5 a.m. my mom freaked out because she heard ‘coyotes,’ which turned out to be roosters.
Like I said, I do not come from outdoorsy stock.
However, through some genetic mutation of preferences, which continues to baffle my folks, I actually enjoy sleeping out in Nature. I’m not, like, super-skilled at it, but when the opportunity arises, like an invitation to a Yosemite weekend with an experienced and fun-loving SF crowd, I’m into it.
So wish me luck, and pray that no coyote devours me.
Kloncke 