TIME TO TAKE THE HIGH GROUND – The Occupy Oakland movement is at the crossroads of peaceful demonstration and violence. It’s time for the ‘organic’ movement to learn how to better cultivate allies.

The San Francisco Bay area has a long history of protest – much of it gone violent. At 1960s UC Berkeley, Vietnam war opponents started as idealistic, flowers in your hair protesters who morphed into glass breakers, nascent fire bugs, and building grabbers with a few Molotov hurlers for good measure. Next door, the hard-scrabble neighborhoods of East Oakland are now the perfect breeding ground for discontent.  It would seem to be the right place for the Occupy movement to set up tents. Plenty of people with grievances and lots of rich people to snub.

But, Occupy Oakland has a dark side.

Peaceful Occupy marches have become a thing of the past in Oakland. Now, the occupiers fan out while windows break, dumpsters flare, and the very people most likely to support Occupy are left to sweep up. Understandably, 99 percent of the 99 Percenters are growing tired and that’s a hell of a way to build a movement. Just ask Sarah Palin.

No Weather Underground

Even the first Occupy march broke some windows and spawned some graffiti, but the mood was more youthful exuberance than Weather Underground sinister. The next day, some of the occupiers went out with cleaning equipment to get clean up the graffiti and help small business owners replace their broken glass – testament to the sane and peaceable idea of protesting in front of the little guys, not driving them off with boorish behavior.

Their relationships with community were basically good, even when they closed the Port of Oakland and cost the rough-hewn Teamsters a day’s pay. The second time around the Teamsters weren’t nearly so understanding and neither was the commuters stranded on some of the most overcrowded freeways in the nation.

Many people blame the Oakland PD for the violence. No doubt they aren’t a crackerjack force. The Feds have them under threat of Federal control because of the tepid pace of court ordered reforms. Incompetent police chiefs and even more incompetent mayors didn’t do much to help. Many people finger the current mayor, Jean Quan, with mismanaging the original outbreaks. And there is some justification; several recall drives are collecting signatures as you read this. She was so bad, she lost several top advisers who couldn’t take the addle-brained chaos.

I know several OPD cops. They’re like cops anywhere. Standing in front of a potentially dangerous mob throwing rocks and bottles at their head understandably makes them edgy. Some react with restraint, others fire tear gas canisters into the crowd or rely a little too heavily on truncheons to break things up. You can charge the PD with using too much force, but if someone was trying to whack me in the head, my adrenaline would be up too.

But most of the cops are doing a job in less than optimal conditions. They have orders. Some don’t agree. They feel the same as some of the cops in the Arab Spring uprisings. They don’t necessarily feel that clubbing their fellow citizens is exactly what they signed up for nor something they particularly feel good about doing.

Like a Sunni in Tehran

But occupiers and cops alike suffer more for the actions of the few. The latest numbers indicate that a healthy majority of people arrested in the melees are true anarchists from out of the Bay Area fixated on no one coming to an agreement over anything…ever.

Occupy Oakland doesn’t need the distractions and fewer cops would be in the street. Oakland citizens might look more favorably on the occupiers if millions of dollars weren’t being spent to keep the peace and pay for damage. They just want to dodge the regular drive bys to go to Safeway. They’re already feeling like a Sunni in Tehran.

A lot has been made about Occupy being “organic” which a $10 word for leaderless uprising is. Occupiers may venerate the “organic” nature of things, but they could use a small leader committee to help keep eyes on the prize, ferret out the anarchists and other malcontents, and do some community outreach to a community that is getting a little battle worn. Have a heart for the cops, plumbers, and taco truck entrepreneurs who just want to make a living in an increasingly difficult place to do it. Turn the violence down a notch.

Focus the organics onto others and give fellow 99 Percenters a break from falling even farther behind.

Related articles

• The Omnipotent Poobah speaks about politics
• Occupy Oakland: Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Protesters (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• Occupy Oakland Thinks Oakland Is its “Playground” (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• Coalition Says No to Occupy Injunctions (musiccopsresent.wordpress.com)
• NBC Ignores Burning of American Flag by Oakland Occupiers |mrc.org (gloucestercitynews.net)
• Occupy Oakland Jumps Up The Movement’s Stakes (prstar.wordpress.com)
• Should #OWS Denounce Occupy Oakland? (crooksandliars.com)
• After Oakland Street Battle, Occupy Movement Split Over Confrontational Tactics (huffingtonpost.com)
• A Tale of Two Occupy Movements: Oakland and Miami (theawl.com)
• What happened in Oakland on Saturday: Good information on the Occupy Oakland situation (onthewilderside.com)

The American electorate is famously uneducated. They’re easily dazzled by slick commercials that eloquently say nothing or by truthy mixes of lies and obfuscation. If guileless Americans had the tiniest speck of skepticism, political advertising wouldn’t work and money would play a smaller part in the process.

All voting blocks – left and right – have fallen for the charlatans’ siren song at some point. As a result, they make such counter-intuitive deviations from common sense they end up hurting their causes more than helping them.

Evangelicals are taking their turns this time around. Perhaps it’s their wholesome trusting nature or the irrational fear that 10% of the population is destroying America by calling Christmas a holiday. So, they’re a particularly tight-knit voting block that typically votes on a narrow slate of family values issues.

They tend to worry less about economic or foreign policy and more about shaping families in their own traditional image – something I was always taught was the exclusive province of God.

Despite their efforts, evangelical-type candidates have self-destructed this time around.  Michele “God’s on the Hotline” Bachmann flamed out early. She acted as though the voice she heard wasn’t God’s, but words from an alien anal probe. She wasn’t left or right, she’ was just over the edge. She managed to scare off a hefty portion of the evangelical vote with her ravings – not an easy thing with people who’ll unquestioningly support you as long as you invoke God often enough.

Then came Gov. Good Hair. He was properly pious. He talked about God and sounded and looked like your common tent-revival preacher. Better…until he proved repeatedly that he couldn’t read the Bible or prompts from the Teleprompter machine without falling directly into the baptismal pool. By sheer force of will and sufficiently odd behavior, he managed to snatch failure from the jaws of victory.

Next came the Godfather of Pizza. He sounded more or less sane, though not particularly light on his rhetorical feet. He was apparently not able to keep his pepperoni out of the oven. There were cries of plots most foul, but the women came out of the woodwork like termites in a broken down barn. As the situation worsened he became increasingly unbelievable and the evangelicals had to desert his sinking family values ship.

Today, Newt rides high. He’s born again, but more importantly he’s not one of those Mormon cultists. However, Newt’s closet comes with ready-made skeletons … lot’s of them … the decidedly non-family values kind. Evangelicals will either have to square Newt’s unsquareable, repeated coveting of his neighbors’ wives or ignore his transgressions. Blessed with a perpetual motion machine of a mouth and wearing his Messianic personality like  cloak of invincibility, Newt will make that a tough order, even for the blindest Godlings. Hence, Newt should be wrapping up his campaign soon, foot in mouth and looking for wife number 4.

That leaves Ron Paul, who doesn’t even talk much about religion, Jon Huntsman, who’s working on stealth campaign technology, and Rick “Man-on-Horse Sex” Santorum. Rick’s claim to fame, other than the outlandish things he says, is a Google search that features a picture of a turd. Let’s face it, while he is very good at being a turd, who wants to pick him up.

Evangelicals may be waiting for Donald Trump and/or Sarah Palin to jump back in, but both think they’re already God – a tough evangelical sell. By voting as a block on a very narrow set of issues, evangelicals will soon find themselves with a gaggle of failed candidates.

It may be time for the uber-pious to start thinking a bit more about other issues and a bit less about flag pins and whether people’s heart-felt tidings of seasonal cheer qualify as slaps to the face by encroaching heathens.

But they better hurry up, they’re running out of candidates.

Related articles

• Mitt Romney still battling questions about religion vs. Newt Gingrich (foleysfolly.com)
• Religion Powerful Force in 2012 Race (abcnews.go.com)
• Romney Launches All-Out Attack on Newt (newser.com)
• Bill Berkowitz: Gingrich: Best Supporting Actor? Newt’s Role in Christian GOTV Flick (huffingtonpost.com)
• Southern Baptist Leader Asks Newt Gingrich To Ask Forgiveness From Evangelicals (alan.com)
• Absolution for Newt (slate.com)
• Let The Cannibalism Begin! GOP Evangelicals eviscerate Newt Gingrich as ‘The Kim Kardasian of The GOP’ (thedigitalliberalalliance.wordpress.com)
• Newt Gingrich’s Baggage Problem (themoderatevoice.com)
• Why Newt Gingrich Is Doomed (usnews.com)

Good Idea - Thinking long is a good idea, but the devil is in the details of how you get it to work.

California, which has a budget crisis that when scaled, is equal to or greater than the country’s has a bipartisan “supercommittee” called the Think Long Committee to  generate ideas for how to get the state out of the mess it’s in. That’s not a bad idea. Undoubtedly, someone should be thinking long.

Among others, Republicans George Schultz and Condi Rice and Democrats Gray Davis and Willie Brown represent the politicos. State Supreme Court Justice Ronald George can weigh in on legal ramifications, and biz guys Eli Broad and Eric Schmidt can address the concerns of business.

But, there’s something obvious about the committee. Do you see a missing stakeholder? It’s the largest stakeholder by far. It’s the stakeholder that will ultimately fund any suggestions that are taken up and has the most to lose if the suggestions turn out bad or get watered down to become hindrances and not successes. One last hint – they’re a whopping 99% slice of California and the other 49 states.

Marge and Joe
Citizens. The plain old Marges and Joes who work hard for a living. They’re the ones that don’t camp out on City Hall’s nice lawn because they’re too busy with two jobs and the grinding work of feeding the kids and keeping a roof of over their heads. They are part of the growing herd of people seeing their worth reduced to that of a “resource” and amortized like a closed factory similar to the one they used to work in.

Citizens are a commonly unrepresented constituency. When a company bankrupts itself through malfeasance and incompetence, workers – who provided more sweat equity and value than any shareholder or executive – are last, or non-existent, on the list of creditors.

In an era where corporations have evolved into supercitizens, fat with an unlimited supply of money from selling the overpriced to the underpaid, Justin P. Citizen can’t be heard for love or lack of money.

All that’s not to say the committee has bad ideas. Among other things, they propose rejiggering tax rates to bring in more money and make  revenue more predictable and less volatile. The want the Legislature to suck it up and plan budgets based on reality, not alchemy. They champion more money for schools, more funding for local governments to do the business of government, and investments in infrastructure. Finally, they say we need to lower the state’s debt.

Well, duh.

The committee’s recommendations are both spot-on and stupid at the same time. Spot-on because no one with an IQ higher than a peanut’s can’t see the wisdom of the proposals. And, the stupidity of thinking that will happen in the sausage factory in Sacramento. In the end, this makes the Think Long Committee more of a Think Short and Let’s Break for Martinis Committee.

Death to Runaway Ballot Initiatives
However, even as they left the terminal tumor of Prop 13 intact, they did suggest calming California’s runaway ballot initiative governance. The initiatives allowed Legislators to have interest groups draft initiatives they can use to duck responsibility for bad decisions and place responsibility on the shoulders of an increasingly polarized and less educated citizenry.

Oddly though, this may have been the most important proposal of them all. The state needs citizens capable of making intelligent decisions, not voters who duck responsibility for spending like, well, legislators. California needs a legislature capable of leading rather than muddying the waters with a baffling array of conflicting ballot initiatives that even the authors can’t understand. California needs a partnership between ALL stakeholders. Educated citizens should work with politicos – and yes, business interests that are not supercitizens, but ancillary institutions – to think long-range and take heat in the short-term in the interests of the long-term. Only then will we see a future any less dire than our present.

But, the most important question remains unanswered:

How the hell to you get this thing to work?

Related articles

• The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks on politics and the economy (omnipotentpoobah.com)
• Nathan Gardels: A Blueprint to Renew California (huffingtonpost.com)
• Think Long Committee for California Releases Tax Reform Report (taxprof.typepad.com)
• Sunday Reading – 11/27/11 (romickinoakley.wordpress.com)
• California Billionaires Want To Raise, Simplify State’s Taxes (forbes.com)
• California Climate Hawks Propose Ballot Initiative For The 99 Percent (thinkprogress.org)
• Think Long panel proposes California tax overhaul (sfgate.com)
• Coalition proposes revamping California tax system (sfgate.com)
• Open Letter To the Supercommittee: Listen Up! Are you Partisan or Patriot? Decide today. (wisebehindyourears.wordpress.com)

USS Holland (AS-3) Off San Diego With Submarines Alongside (circa 1935)

As I write this two American flags hang on my wall. Both are folded into militarily tight triangles and protected by flag boxes. One contains a Purple Heart, the other the WWII Service Medal and Pacific Service Medal. One day my own flag with a Cold War Service Medal will join them.

WWI Poison Gas Victims

My grandfather received the Purple Heart after being shot and mustard-gassed in contested Alsace-Lorraine. He knew his location only by the strange melange of French and German the locals spoke.

His injuries were severe. Gruesome battlefield triage located him near the bottom of the list based on the likelihood his wounds were fatal. They laid him on a blanket spread across war-churned mud to die. He received only a daily ration of bread and some water. After a week, he beat the odds and finally received some medical attention, eventually going home.

The Mail Had to Go Through
He tried to reenlist at the beginning of WWII, but was barred because he held a critical wartime job – clerk on a railway post office shuttling through a dozen or more Montana and North Dakota ‘burgs. His car is on display at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento, proof the world is very small.

His daughter went to work at Boeing as a draftsman working on the B-29. My mother worked as a crane operator at a former toy factory in Toledo converted to manufacturing tank barrels. They were Rosie the Riveters and every bit as important and deserving of praise as the men they supported.

YP-73 in for Repairs, Kodiak, AK (4/10/41)

My father joined the Naval Reserve midway through his senior year in high school, only months before Dec. 7. He became a radioman and immediately shipped out to Alaska. There, he served aboard the YP-73, a converted salmon fishing boat tasked with patrolling the Aleutians.

Like many men of the era he was taciturn about his service. A few years before he died he told me a new story he’d never mentioned before. I’m still not sure why he did.

On Dec. 8, 1941 – less than 24 hours after the war began – his small boat forced a Dutch ship carrying a cargo of Japanese silk to stop off Dutch Harbor. His boarding party found a Japanese officer escorting the cargo and took him prisoner. Surely one of the first prisoners of the war.

Aboard the Gar One Last Time

USS Gar (SS-206) at Mare Island, CA (circa 1941)

Later he became a submariner, serving two war patrols aboard the USS Gar. After the patrols, he transferred to the personal staff of the Commander of Submarine Forces (Pacific), Adm. Charles Lockwood, aboard the submarine tender USS Holland.

Growing up, I heard many tales about the Pacific islands and countries he visited. They were unstintingly light-hearted, “There was one time we went to a beer garden and…,” they usually began. I assumed his war patrols had been relatively combat-free and that service on the Admiral’s staff wasn’t exactly tough duty.

It turned out my assumption was wrong.

My Dad died at 86. He suffered a stroke a few months before pneumonia finally got him. The stroke left him semi-conscious for the better part of a week and every few hours he’d verbalize his delusions.

He talked to my long-dead mother. He took up his old vocation by controlling aircraft in his sleep. He described a sinister organization called, The Group that imprisoned him in a school. Oddly, The Group’s commandant was one of his least favorite people, Pat Robertson.

One afternoon he started mumbling and his voice grew steadily louder. He shouted the names of his Gar shipmates. He cried out for help and wept as if holding a shipmate during his last moments. It was clear from his fevered talk that he was back 65 years aboard a submarine under attack.

I suppose he could’ve been dreaming about a fantasy like The Group, but his voice betrayed an emotion and reality his Group rants never had. I listened to his cries for help, stung that I could to nothing to ease his pain. On that sunny afternoon I became his crewmate holding him as he held his shipmate. That pain taught me something about the man I’d known my entire life.

I saw him in a different light and was boundlessly proud of him.

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• A time for remembering (swwashingtonredcross.wordpress.com)
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• L.I. Man Says Thieves Stole His Grandfather’s Purple Heart, Dog Tags (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• A Hero to Remember (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
• Submariners unsung heroes of Cold War (cnn.com)
• Veteran’s Day: Why the Odds Were Against My Existence (danceswithchaos.wordpress.com)
• It’s Veterans Day, so… you’re welcome (hotair.com)
• The WWII ShoeBox Project (thedenveregotist.com)
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But, there’s the message and then there’s the way you deliver the message.

Backyard Skeptics, an organization that bills itself as, “Where humanists, rational thinkers, atheists and agnostics have a place to explore the world without religious dogma,” plans this weekend to rip pages out of the Bible they believe portray immoral biblical law.

The message that the Bible has passages that are immoral is a valid topic for discussion. Some reasoned discourse on biblical questions like these would be welcome in an era when understanding one another is limited to how loudly you yell at your opponents.

Non-Desecration By Destruction
But Backyard Skeptics Director Bruce Gleason says, “We’re not there to burn the Bible or desecrate. There are plenty [of] verses in the Bible that if you did any of those things today, you’d be thrown in jail immediately.”

True, some of those things would get you arrested, convicted, and maybe even sent to death row. But, Gleason’s claim that he isn’t there to “desecrate” the Bible rings hollow. Most Christians would beg to differ that ripping pages out of their holy book isn’t desecration and they aren’t the only ones.

Muslims understandably weren’t so pleased when renown nutcase and “clergyman” Terry Jones thought toasting marshmallows over an open fire of burning Korans would be a fine thing. In fact, Jones’ justifications weren’t all that different from Gleason’s. “Jesus would not run around burning books,” Jones said last year, “but I think he would burn this one [because He disagrees with it].”

And interestingly, Gleason’s protest engages in what Christians might call evangelism, but with a secular twist. “We want to make this a better world for secular and humanistic values,” Gleason said. “We don’t believe prayer works. We don’t believe religion adds anything except a sense of false hope.”

I believe Christians often rely too heavily on martyrdom. It’s their constant screed they’re an endangered species being systematically rubbed out by the forked-tailed devils around them. That’s an outrageous debating point for a group that makes up 75-80% of the American population. It’s nothing more than needless antagonism toward people who don’t believe what they believe…just as atheists ripping pages out of a Bible make their motives suspect.

Jugheads Doomed to Hell
And it’s not that theists don’t engage in their own intolerance. Atheists are probably one of the groups most singled out by theists. At least Muslims believe in some God, even if many Christians believe Allah is a mere pretender to the throne of higher power. Believe in yourself and you’re some sort of jughead doomed to Hell and sucking the faithful right along with you – a sort of reverse Rapture.

This isn’t a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that desecrating books or flags, or almost anything else is free speech and on that I agree with them (as long as that freedom is doled out equally for all). After all, they only ruled the speech free, not that it wasn’t ill-advised or provocative.

No, this is a matter of communicating beliefs. Dueling billboards that promote God or atheism? OK. Handing out information about your beliefs? OK, as long as you don’t tag along trying to convert me when all I want is a nice walk in the park. Ripping, burning, pissing on, or otherwise disrespecting someone’s belief symbols is intrusive, insulting, provocative, and needless.

In other words, it’s a hell of a way to rally people to your cause.

The Omnipotent Poobah, aka Jack Koeneman, is an atheist.

 Related articles

• More From the Poobah on Religion (omnipotentpoobah.com)
• Atheist Group To Publicly Destroy ‘Immoral’ Pages of the Bible (inquisitr.com)
• Atheist Groups Plans to Rip Up Bible in a Demonstration This Saturday (patheos.com)
• Believe in mad rubbish because it’s good for you (freethoughtblogs.com)
• I have doubts Backyard Skeptics (mojoey.blogspot.com)
• Are Atheists Obsessed With God? (anythingbuttheist.blogspot.com)
• “Atheists Are Just Spiritually Lazy” ….O’RLY?! (blackatheists.wordpress.com)