intellectual properties

health, wealth and $inequality$ in the land of opportunity

in addition to going back to work and catching up there, a couple of other things have been on my mind/occupying my time more than thinking about or writing about burning man since we got back, which is why i haven’t yet. well, that and i’m not sure what to say really about my burning man experience this year; it’s still gestating. and maybe not that interesting.

the first thing is that i started not feeling well on the playa around thursday afternoon, but attributed it to the heat and the general physical stress that everyone experiences while out there. a general persistent state of lightheadedness/dizziness combined with little or no appetite. even after we left the playa and i got 2 solid nights sleep and plenty of food and water in reno/tahoe, the state persisted and i have really not feeling been right since returning (still lightheaded/dizzy/head hurts in weird ways/vision is funny. it’s sort of psychedelic, but not in a good way). i have more or less been going straight home from work and lying down (haven’t cleaned the dust off of anything; house is a total mess). recall that i had a similar problem a couple of years ago which the dr. diagnosed as a balance/inner ear problem, and perhaps the elevation changes etc going back and forth over the mountains to burning man/tahoe is the culprit. this feels sort of the same, but slightly different, and i think me worrying about it is also causing anxiety issues. i’ve been experiencing weird physical stuff for a while now and am not really functioning well at the moment. i am feeling slightly better today but have a dr. appt on monday AM, so we’ll see.

more than likely, it is probably that these are symptoms of general physical anxiety due to the fact that my situation at home is more than a little unnerving, and i haven’t been sleeping well and have been spending a lot of time paranoid and freaked out.

recall that the morning we were leaving for burning man, we packed up the car and left it parked outside the backdoor - which is on the street and not inside our gated lot, but is way closer for loading stuff - we left it unguarded for approx 5 minutes while we went inside and went to the bathroom before hitting the road. during that 5 minutes at 9 am in broad daylight someone smashed the window on our rental minivan and stole jay’s laptop and all of his DJ equipment. we ended up just going to burning man with a busted window, our auto insurance will maybe cover getting it fixed, and our renters insurance will theoretically cover the cost to replace most of his stuff, but it put quite the damper on our moods.

so………we figured it was just us being stupid white people leaving a fully loaded car on the street (but still - wow - 9am?), but when we got back we found out that several people in our building had their cars broken into INSIDE our lot, that more than one unit had attempted burglaries (mostly units with doors that open onto the street), and that there had been several other incidents while we were gone, one involving a guy with a knife.

then thursday morning (48 hours ago) at around 2:00am, 2 guys came into the lot and 2 more cars got broken into. it was caught on camera, and to watch them case the parking lot is really creepy. when we heard this when we got home last night we went to take everything out of our cars. while we were doing this, we heard some yelling and saw the guys from the steel mill across the street run out chasing someone down the street with 2×4’s. the guy dropped a duffel bag full of stuff into the middle of the street and ran.

and then, an hour later, while people were in the garden talking about all this with our building manager, some guy came striding through the parking lot making a beeline for the open door (when people are sitting in the garden they usually leave the door open cuz it’s right there), walked past the people in the garden into our hallway, and they all went in to ask what he thought he was doing and he said he “just needed to take a dump” and took off running.

so our building has become a major target and the thieves are bold as hell. we have a gate that opens and closes when cars come in and out, and that’s presumably how they get in and out, although in the video they didn’t follow a car in. there’s a locked door on the gate they were picking; that or they are climbing the fence that we share with the cement company next door, we’re not sure.

i honestly don’t feel safe at home right now and am super paranoid and it totally sucks, and we are probably going to try to move soon, which also sucks, and the stress of even thinking about moving is more than i want to deal with right now.

more globally, this problem also makes me really depressed, and all the way to burning man i couldn’t stop thinking about it. we aren’t the only people living in our neighborhood, and i’m sure that many families, businesses, and residents are also feeling paranoid and on edge, afraid to let their children out, afraid to go about their lives without looking over their shoulders, guarding themselves and their property. we aren’t the only community that is suffering from a crime wave, and that makes me very sad, thinking that so many people are suffering from this right now. at least no one has been shot in my neighborhood — yet.  that is my worst fear.

what is the community discussion on the other end of the spectrum, i wonder?  what do they sit around and talk about after breaking into our cars and homes?  what is their frame of reference? how do they feel about and justify all of this?  is it a Robin Hood mentality, or selfish and drug-fueled? movies like Boyz in the Hood have attempted to portray this mentality in terms that the rest of our culture can understand, but i don’t think we ever really will.

a couple of months ago i had a work meeting at the west oakland library, just a few blocks from my house, about air pollution problems in the neighborhood. the meeting had coffee, tea, cookies and other snack foods for the participants. about halfway through the meeting a young man snuck into the back of the room, and at first i was the only person who saw him, but i didn’t want to get up in the middle of the meeting and make a scene asking him what he was doing. he was just a hungry kid. another woman saw him, sat him down in a chair, gave him an agenda, as if he was there for the meeting, trying to get him involved in this community issue. he sat down next to her, but the whole time he sat there he kept looking over his shoulder at the food table. again and again. she finally encouraged him to get some refreshments, and he filled up his hands with as many cookies and sodas as he could carry and walked out. i felt bad for that kid. i’ve been there.

this idea that even poor americans have it better than, say, poor africans or poor sri lankans and therefore they have no excuses for bad behavior is ludicrous. our consumerist culture has created this problem, and besides, wealth is relative:

Economic libertarians argue that this growing inequality is unimportant: aren’t the poor of 2008 still far better off in terms of real income, health, life expectancy, and material comfort than even the richest citizen in 1900?

The fallacy of this argument is that human beings do not measure their well-being by absolute real income or longevity — but rather in relative terms…

…extreme income and wealth inequality alone may hinder growth. After all “respect for property rights” is really, in most cases, shorthand for “respect by the have-nots for the property rights of the haves.” If those on the bottom rungs do not feel that they are getting a fair shake, the very bedrock of our prosperity crumbles into social and economic apartheid as millions of Americans flee to gated communities, millions more are required to staff the burgeoning private security industry, and yet more millions fill our prisons.
–how big of a deal is income inequality? (freakonomics)

income inequality and the associated classism and division between the “haves” and the “have nots” is a much larger cultural problem than racism at this point, IMO. of course, they feed into eachother, especially in a neighborhood in west oakland, but in a capitalist society, it’s money that solves and creates problems. what matters more is not what color you are, but how rich you are. this has been ingrained in the urban youth of america, and thus, when the acceptable ways of gaining wealth are not accessible to them (for various innumerable reasons) - education and employment - they resort to the other ways to get rich: selling drugs and stealing.

so then i also don’t know how to feel about these thieves who are making my life miserable, these thugs who are living their lives this way, these people who feel pushed to the fringe and have been corrupted by the realities of being poor in a rich man’s world. i’ve been poor, and yes, i have also stolen, and used the same justification for doing so that i assume many of these theives do too: i want what everyone else has, but i can’t afford to buy it, so i’m taking it from someone else who can.

right after our stuff got stolen (which literally brought jay to his knees when it happened, and if there’s anything that will make me angry and defensive it’s seeing someone i love feel totally helpless and violated), i said something to the effect of “they’ll get what’s coming to them. in a year, that guy will be dead, shot in the street” and afterward i felt really bad about saying that. i felt bad about wishing bad karma on someone, wishing they’d “get what’s coming to them”, forgetting that their families probably worry about them day and night and their mothers would cry just as hard if they got shot as mine would. i brooded about that for a while. am i letting fear and anger change my morality? am i a white liberal racist? do i have so much white guilt i won’t allow myself to be as rightfully angry as i should be?

i was thinking about these things a lot while sitting on the playa at burning man, watching the predominantly white crowd of people go by in their silly costumes on their silly bikes having a silly time; people who have the luxury of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to take off for the desert for a week creating art and taking pleasure in the drugs that come up through the violent channels that fuel so much of this violence at home and abroad. what part of that is the american dream? the NIMBYism, the escapism, the privileged and sheltered world view? how does the way of life where i live in west oakland fit into the same america as burning man? is the common thread “the land of opportunity” - taking advantage of the opportunity to steal or the opportunity to create? or creating opportunities to meet your wants and needs, whether that means taking free food from a meeting when you’re hungry, breaking into someone’s car when they’re not looking, walking naked through a dusty city, or creating your art in a free-expression forum?

these, combined with tracking all of the GOP convention/election bullshit and the fact that the hurricanes in the southeast are affecting our september meeting schedules and work projects and causing all sorts of logistical problems, are the things i have been occupied with since coming back, so much so that my burning man experience seems rather unimportant to think about right now, but i will get to it eventually, if only for the sake of the record.

right now i could use a real vacation.