There’s a point that sometimes gets overlooked in all of our political conversations about homelessness, cops and crime.
We talk a lot about these issues, as we should. We analyze the complexities of the Encampment Management Policy, and we get outraged by the calls for defunding and even for abolishing the Oakland Police Department. All this activity on our part is important and necessary.
But the reality that overrides and undergirds everything we do is simple: our love for The Town, Oakland.
I don’t think any of us would have gotten involved in this Coalition for a Better Oakland if we didn’t have a deep, abiding affection for the city we call home. I certainly, in my retirement, didn’t think I’d get involved in political organizing. But my love for Oakland has made me do it.
I moved to Adams Point in 1987, because I got a job here. I’d been living in San Francisco for years, and didn’t know very much about Oakland, except that it was sunnier and warmer than the city. Oakland didn’t have a very good reputation in the West Bay; San Franciscans had a superiority complex that, unfortunately, I shared.
But it didn’t take me long to appreciate Oakland’s wonderfulness. Yes, the weather was much better. But I also loved Lake Merritt and the park. I liked the slower pace of life, and the neighborhoods, and the refuge the hills offered. I frequented the restaurants (ethnic and cheap) and bars (funky). Oakland appealed to the “big city” guy in me (I’m a native New Yorker) but it was friendlier than either San Francisco or New York. I really liked Oakland’s diversity. It was a true rainbow coalition, and people didn’t have the snootiness of San Franciscans. Oaklanders were solid, down to earth, and real.
I realized that Oakland had problems, especially crime and poverty. I also experienced the negative perception outsiders had of it. I was once at my cousin’s house in Malibu, back in the early 1990s. She’s wealthy, and her friends are even richer. She had invited some neighbors over, and when she introduced me and told them I was from Oakland, one of the men—a yuppie in “the industry” (entertainment)—said, “Really? I didn’t know there were any decent people in Oakland.”
I don’t think he was kidding. I was terribly offended, excused myself from their company, and didn’t rejoin them for the rest of the evening. It was incidents like that that shored up my love for Oakland and made me want to protect and defend it. Oakland might have its problems, but, damn it, they were our problems, and we’d deal with them our way. It made me love Oakland even more.
That love, and that desire to protect and defend my city, are above and behind everything I do, and we do, here at the Coalition. It’s why we work so hard to resist the silliness of a city government that increasingly is clueless. This is the Battle of Oakland. This is why we fight.