Storming the Gates of Paradise (28 page)

“On the tear gas–shrouded streets of Seattle,” reported the
L.A. Times
back then, “the unruly forces of democracy collided with the elite world of trade policy. And when the meeting ended in failure on Friday, the elitists had lost and the debate had changed forever.” It was a world-changing moment, the golden dawn of a so-far not-so-rosy new millennium. But there wasn’t any activist violence against living beings. (Some “black bloc” kids did do a little downtown window smashing and spray-painting and stirred up an interesting side debate about whether property damage alone constitutes violence.) The year 1999 was the otherwise uncommemorated 150th anniversary of the publication of “Civil Disobedience,” though, come to think of it, ten thousand anarchists and environmentalists standing up against giving the world away to corporations is perhaps the most apt anniversary event that eco-anarchist Henry David could have dreamed of.

The police and the media willfully, if not consciously, mistake what kind of
danger civil disobedients pose. Martin Luther King Jr., that reader of Thoreau and great advocate of nonviolent civil disobedience, was a dangerous man in his time, because he posed a threat to the status quo, and it was for that reason that the FBI followed him and many hated him. Like Thoreau, he went to jail; like Thoreau, he posed no physical danger to anyone. But to admit that activists can be dangers to the status quo is to admit first that there is a status quo, second that the status quo may be an unjust and unjustifiable thing, and third that it can indeed be changed, by passionate people and nonviolent means. Better to portray activists as criminals and the status quo as the natural order—and celebrate revolutionaries only long after their causes are won and their voices are softened by time, or misrepresentation, for Thoreau and King are still dangerous men to those who pay attention to their words. And so for my own as-yet unassimilated generation of activists, the fiction of a violent past has been manufactured, just as the fiction of spitting in returning soldiers’ faces was fabricated to damn the activists who opposed the war in Vietnam.

In 1999, civil disobedients in this country changed the world by bringing the conversation about globalization to the first world and joining the movements that brought the WTO into its state of stalemate. Exercising your rights doesn’t always achieve something so remarkable, but the exercise is important anyway. Rights are only valuable if they are used. My heroine from that recent spell of First Amendment wrestling matches in New York is a fellow San Franciscan, the sister of a friend, June Brashares, who along with many other members of Code Pink got into the Republican convention (in her case, she thinks it was her fake pearls, along with a nice blue suit, that got her through security). “I wanted to get inside to show some of that dissent that was not being shown,” she told me. “I’m very much in opposition to the war in Iraq. The lives that have been destroyed and the people that have been killed—I care very much about those things.”

She stood up during Bush’s acceptance speech to unfurl a banner that said, “Bush lies, people die.” June is very polite and didn’t interrupt the president, and she would have left if asked, but she was immediately tackled by burly security guards just for holding up dissenting words. And so, as she was dragged away, she shouted the words on her confiscated banner, though she was drowned out by the
nearby party loyalists attempting to mask her voice by chanting, “Four more years.” That ruckus was so loud that it rattled the president, who paused, looked cranky, and lost his place. June says of the many taped versions of the president’s speech she watched, “He’s got this frozen moment like the Pet Goat moment [Bush’s famous paralysis, while reading to Florida schoolchildren, upon being told of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers] and looks to the side and kinda smiles and goes to go on, and then he stumbles. It made a lot of activists really happy, it made their night watching him drone on and on and then seeing this protest.” Some television stations showed the disruption clearly, some did not. Thoreau said, “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” She did. We should. And could.

Still.

In the final words of my 1994 book
Savage Dreams
, I claimed the Nevada Test Site as home—“This time I was only going back,” I wrote about leaving the site, “because I was already home.” To claim this place where a thousand nuclear bombs have been exploded as home was to embrace the generosity of the desert’s light and space and of the community gathered there, and to assume responsibility for the legacies of the Indian and nuclear wars that will never come to something as simple as an end. This question of what home is comes up for me again and again in this era of real estate obsession, of
Dwell
and
Nest
magazines, and of abandonment or loss of any larger sense of belonging.

Even the word
home
is treacherous in this country’s iron age of homeland security and homelessness. The first term implies that the nation is a home, but only by imagining everything beyond those bounds as dangerous, alien, and ominous. As we have learned during all those orange and chartreuse and maroon alerts, security is invoked only as the other face of insecurity, the threats that are supposed to make us close our doors and borders to strangers, to difference, to negotiation, to trust and hope. Homelessness is at the other end of the scale: it references the domestic interior that, thanks to our homeland economics, is denied to many people nowadays.

Somewhere in between, something is missing. The answer might be about being at home in the world, an answer that immediately questions homeland security, with its portrayal of everything outside a neatly defined home as a threat, and also questions homelessness, for these people are out in a harsh world that is
adamantly not home, made unwelcoming by the retreat from any embrace of common good and civil society. The retreat is spurred by the twin forces of privatization and what I now think of as the fear economy, the governmentally produced fears—cold wars, terrorisms—that make for a more docile populace (and the government policies that have made the world genuinely less safe). Docile people are less bold about challenging authority or otherwise venturing into the public realm, a nice spur to the privatization that affects not only resources and rules but psyches. It is the abandonment of this public sphere that has left the corpse of democracy to be gnawed by the CEOs who are now also our federal government.

The forester and poet Gary Snyder likes to say that the most radical thing you can do is to stay home. This implies a fine bioregional localness—but not as local as the interior of your home. Rather, I think he means home as a foundation from which to venture, a ground to stand on so that you can stand for something; and home as a sense of community, of knowledge, of belonging through commitment rather than only privilege. And this implies what it might mean to be at home in the world, to have what for nomads is a winter camp—a familiar place to come back to, but in part so that you can venture out and broaden your horizons, make your peace with the world, embrace difference.

And here I think the literal public sphere—streets, subways, plazas, libraries, post offices—matters as the staging ground for the imagined public sphere, the arena in which people think about politics and public life and feel a sense of embeddedness in it as both beneficiaries and caretakers. I think about this sense of home in my own city as I cross paths constantly with people who live in a different sense of the same place—the undocumented immigrants who know the Mission District, the construction sites, and the routes to their villages in Mexico; the African American kids who often have hardly been out of the city at all, even to the hills and beaches immediately across the Golden Gate, but have a careful social map of their peers across the city. But they live in part in public.

I think about it too as I encounter the more suburbanized of my fellow citizens, who believe in home as what you have a mortgage on, with the rest of the world beyond the bounds of that own secured homeland, these neighbors who seem to leave their houses only to get into their cars to go to places they know—
perhaps know from other cities, the Starbucks and Walgreens that make everywhere into nowhere nowadays. Nothing on earth is sadder than their rummage sales, where they sell off the Ikea and Pottery Barn trappings they will replace at the next stop in this world, which for them must seem so much like an infinite airport without exits, familiar to the point of endless repetition but hardly home in any more passionate or particular sense. In the affluent world, you are never really at home but also are never really away, for the homogenizing forces of global capital bring the familiar lattes and logo products to the far corners of the globe.

In the Bay Area, one of our more annoying Silicon Valley billionaires recently announced plans to build a 72,000-square-foot home that will essentially be a city made for one man and his family, but an impoverished city, empty of encounters, limited by their own imaginations. Kierkegaard once announced that thieves and the rich have in common that they live in hiding, and in this regard you can see that in some ways the rich are poorer than the ordinary citizens who don’t fear to mingle with strangers and therefore own their cities or towns—who are at home in the world. Some of the less affluent children of suburbia embrace my city wholeheartedly, the kids living with lots of roommates who hold their cell phone conversations and smoke their cigarettes on the front steps, do their homework in cafés, and barrel around on bikes.

When I wrote about walking, I learned that one version of home is everything you can walk to. Thus I, with my few hundred square feet of rented space, can also claim a thousand-acre park that ends at the Pacific with a beach full of seabirds; four or five movie theaters; hundreds of restaurants, bars, and cafés; a big public library; way too many tattoo parlors; a fine collection of monuments, views, promenades, and more.

The Latinoization of the United States poses the interesting question of whether Latinos will urbanize us with a more dynamic life on the street before we suburbanize them—both forces are at work in the Southwest. Here is where we see that infrastructure is not enough, for different communities can privatize or socialize the same spaces; you can’t design civil society, though you can design civil society’s habitat out of existence.

An urban activist recently said to me, apropos of something else, “But they
don’t make kids with legs anymore,” speaking of how the kids in the immigrant Latino community where she has spent her life don’t walk around much anymore, kept inside both by television and by their parents’ fears. I fear what will become of a generation kept under house arrest: Who will they be without the education in adventure, unfamiliarity, straying and finding the way back, damming creeks and climbing trees that was practically a birthright for most American kids (except the urban ones who had their own turf of tramlines and vacant lots)? How will they care about an environment they have barely encountered—for, after all, so many naturalists and environmentalists began by turning over logs to look at insects, by wandering the hills, by finding their way into a world in which human beings were not alone? How will these kids be at home in a world they have hardly visited?

There are no grand solutions, only everyday practices of paying attention, of valuing difference and the openness that comes with some risk, of rethinking home, and of refusing to be afraid.

Nineteenth-century Paris was often compared to a wilderness by its poets and writers. They sensed that the city had somehow become so vast, so magical and unpredictable, that one could wander it as though it were not made by human beings and reason, but rather had sprung up with all the mystery and intricacy of a jungle. And the feral city was perceived as a pleasure, at least for those bold and free enough to venture into its byways and dangers. Alexandre Dumas wrote about “Les Mohicans du Paris,” and many saw themselves as explorers.

Before gas lighting, European cities had been as dark as a forest at night—darker than much of the countryside, for the buildings blocked starlight and moonlight—and predators roamed the byways, pouncing on unsuspecting stragglers. You dressed down or hired a torchbearer and guards, or both. Or you stayed home—if you had one. In the mid-twentieth century, the great German-Jewish cultural theorist and Parisian Walter Benjamin wrote again and again of Paris as a labyrinth, a forest, a mystery, and a joy. He once reminisced, “I saw sunset and dawn, but between the two I found myself a shelter. Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me.”

In recent years, American cities have become a wilderness of another sort. The homeless live in our built environment as though they are not the species for which it was built. Doorways are their caves, boxes their beds of boughs, fountains their pools, sidewalks their porches and dining rooms. Like backpackers and nomads, they must carry their goods with them in bags or shopping carts. Like
jackals and buzzards, they live by scavenging the leftovers of more privileged predators. They roam exposed to the elements, mapping the small routes of daily survival—the recycling center where cans and bottles turn into cash; the places that serve free food, offer social services, or allow congregation. The homeless live in the city as though it were a wilderness: not a wilderness of symbiosis, of beauty, of complexity, in the way hunter-gatherers might live in a landscape too well-known to be a wilderness, but a wilderness that is not safe, not reliable, not made for them. It is the wilderness into which Old Testament exiles were driven. It’s the world we’ve made of late.

But it is not they who have become savages in the wild city. We have. They are there because we—the we who elected Ronald Reagan, who chose to vote for the tax cuts that meant drastic social services cuts, who allowed the New Deal and the Great Society to be canceled, the we who looked the other way or did not resist hard enough—decided to create this wilderness for them. I remember that twenty years ago, when the huge army of the homeless was first being turned out into American cities, a writer expressed shock that this wealthiest nation had become like Brazil or India, a place where the affluent stepped over the dying on their way to the opera. I thought of this recently when friends from suburbia came to town and I guided them around my familiar haunts. They were shocked and a little alarmed by the homeless, and I realized I’d grown accustomed to people living on the street. I was not afraid of them and tried to give them back, in conversation and body language, a little of the dignity that had been stripped from them. But I was also troublingly accustomed to a society in which people suffer, overdose, go mad, and die in the streets.