We had a meeting yesterday of supporters of Seneca Scott, who’s running for Mayor of Oakland. A very good discussion was had about homelessness, encampments, crime, police and the like, at which one thing quickly became apparent (to me, anyway…): there is a sort of split among us. That division is between those who want action now to help the homeless, mainly with their drug problems; and those who want to address the serious issues of crime, which is tied in with homelessness (for better or for worse).
Those in the former group tend to feel that tackling crime can wait. The first thing they want to do is get homeless people off drugs so they can work to help themselves—because if they can’t do that, then no matter how much money is dumped into homelessness, it will never be enough. Those in the latter group—who tend to live in the areas of Oakland most severely impacted by encampments, such as Fruitvale—insist that their immediate needs must come first. They are constantly threatened and robbed by criminals. They have to live with the eyesore of massive dumps of garbage and with open-air drug dealing. They can’t let their children play outdoors. Their lives have been up-ended; they call the cops, and if they’re lucky, a cop may actually show up—18 hours later. They’re suffering from a form of PTSD, and it’s painful to listen to their grievances.
Both groups are legitimately passionate. What troubled me was a certain amount of tension between them. It’s as if the first group—the ones wanting to tackle substance abuse among the homeless—were saying to the second group, “You’re being short-sighted. If we can’t end drug addiction, then there’s no possibility of your neighborhood becoming safer.” Meanwhile, the second group responds, “You’re insensitive to our plight. You don’t have to live under war conditions, like we do. The city must help us; otherwise, it ceases to be a city.”
It was painful for me to see this split. And I thought, “Wait a minute. We’re all on the same side, right? We’re all in favor of LGBT rights. We’re all, or mostly, pro-abortion. We all want more action on global warming and weaning our country off fossil fuels. Most of us want to tax billionaires. We all favor diversity in Oakland. We all want to solve homelessness and crime. We all believe in keeping religion out of governance. We all believe in science. There are so many issues that unite us. But, somehow, we’ve allowed ‘them’ (whoever ‘they’ are) to divide us, so that we’re quarreling amongst ourselves, instead of uniting together to fight the common enemy—the forces of racism, homophobia, income inequality, xenophobia, misogyny and so on. How did this happen?”
This gets me back to the title of this post: What do the words “Coalition” and “Together” really mean? “Coalition,” of course, is part of the name of this group, the Coalition for a Better Oakland. “Together” is part of the name of Seneca Scott’s group, Neighbors Together. Both words suggest an alliance. People in alliances can have differences, but they unite in common cause because that’s how they can get enough power to be effective. They temporarily put aside their differences in order to focus their energies on the common good. At some point down the line, they may end up in political opposition to each other, but until that day, they work in synch.
And that’s how I feel about the two groups I’ve described. There are areas where we disagree. But this disagreement merely reflects the divide that exists throughout the greater society, and through the Democratic Party. The way to deal with it is to talk, talk, talk—get to know each other, try to persuade those who disagree with you to come over to your side, even as they try to persuade you to come over to theirs. This is a main reason I find the refusal of Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan and Sheng Thao to even meet with us so distasteful. How can any of them pretend to run a city, when they won’t even sit down and talk with us, people who love Oakland? For myself—and I know Seneca feels the same way—we will never wrap ourselves in bubbles and refuse to meet with political opponents. That isn’t politics; it’s a cult.
Steve Heimoff