Protest8SF: Prop. 8 Protest 11/15, 10:30 A.M. City Hall
JoinTheImpact (their servers have been overloaded, so the site might be down) is organizing a national day of GLBTQI rights protests: Saturday, Nov. 15, 10:30 A.M. Pacific / 1:30 P.M. Eastern at your city hall. There’s quite a long list of protests at the site and lots of people are stepping up to organize protests in various cities and states across the nation. Check it out – there might already be a protest in your city and if there’s not, you can start one! I think this could be really powerful. The anger and energy coming out of the GLBTQI + allies community is astounding and although it’s in immediate reaction to the anti-marriage equality bans, we can make it much bigger than that: marriage equality, a fully inclusive ENDA, a GLBTQI hate crimes act (that absolutely must include transpeople, since they are so often the victims of vicious violence that is ignored or turned into joke fodder), the repeal of DADT, insert your hopes and dreams here. This movement is our movement: yours and mine and everyone else’s. This is a big grassroots movement and grassroots movements are led by ordinary citizens-turned-activists that grab megaphones and take a step forward, leading everyone else with them.
As Redstar points out, one of the side effects of the Obama campaign and, indeed, the many political campaigns that just concluded is that there are now thousands, if not millions of people that are trained in grassroots organizing. There are people that know what a campaign needs, people that know how to organize people, people that know how to organize events, people that know how to organize publicity, people that know how to phonebank and distribute fliers and spread publicity online and go door to door and fundraise. All of these people can take their skills and turn them to social justice and civil rights causes. I got my training from recruiting volunteers in person and phonebanking for the No on 4 and No on 8 campaigns and seeing how they organized their statewide and local strategy. The Yes on K campaign did an amazing job of building coalitions with local political parties, clubs, social justice causes, reaching out to minority communities, and getting their message out in local, national, and alternative media. Years ago, I managed online and offline publicity for a nonprofit cause. I can use these tools and experiences and so can the many people that got their first tastes of activism in this election cycle. The question is how to harness their energy, knowledge, and experience for social justice causes? Personally, I’d like to get more involved in the immigrant rights movement and I’ll have to look into that. But I digress.
In my own fabulous city of SF, on Friday night there was a great, spontaneous, grassroots & netroots march from Hallidie Plaza through the Castro to Dolores Park and then back to the steps of City Hall, where drag queen Pollo Del Mar spoke and charged everyone present to go back into their communities and spread the word. I have lots of great pictures from the march and I’ll put them up sooner or later. Probably later and probably on Picasa or flickr – uploading a lot of photos to WordPress is both timeconsuming and annoying.
Upcoming protests: I mentioned JoinTheImpact at the beginning of this post, and I’ll end with them. There is a JTI protest scheduled for 11/15, 10:30 A.M. at San Francisco City Hall (google map address). The folks at Protest8SF.wordpress.com are working on organizing it: they have a preliminary to do list, fliers for publicity, and a googlegroups list serv that anyone can join to help with the organizing. If you’re in SF, check out the website to see if you can help and definitely come to the rally! If you’re not in SF, please pass the links along and spread the word.
Web organizing techniques + community organizing techniques + campaign techniques = much easier to organize social justice movements? Y/N? I’ll have to think about this.
ETA: thatonegaykid says that there is a JoinTheImpact protest 11/15 in Orange County, 1 P.M. at Irvine City Hall. Please get in touch with her (thatonegaykid.wordpress.com)to find out more!
Oof.
What I said about watching SGA tonight, I take that back. I’m just now leaving work and I haven’t had dinner or showered and I don’t want to stare at a laptop any longer.
I miss walking home to the South End. I don’t know how safe or unsafe it is to walk home at night to my Lower Nob/Tenderloin flat from SoMa, but the fact that I have to think about this makes me reluctant to walk. I got takeaway from a Pakistani place in the Tenderloin a few nights ago, and I haven’t been that freaked out about something in longer than I can remember. Is it a question of ignorance being bliss? I wandered through Rome and Istanbul at night and never felt unsafe. Granted, there are other factors at play, such as the condition of the streets, the presence or absence of people, etc., but I felt comfortable in the ramshackle areas of Istanbul and I’ve never felt unsafe in Rome. I think building architecture has something to do with it. The areas of SF that I will be passing through feature wide streets with heavy traffic; tall, cold skyscrapers; and highway overpasses. All of these scream utilitarian, pedestrian-unfriendly, and places to hurry through rather than linger. The lack of features and spaces that encourage people to hang out, to say nothing of anti-loitering policies, make me feel unwelcome in a way that the urban landscapes of the most deserted, graffiti-covered, and littered parts of Rome didn’t.
San Francisco: Housing
I’m living in San Francisco these days. If you are around and have an interest in Dorky Touristy Things, restaurants, or similar, drop me a comment!
I go back and forth on what I think of being in SF. On the one hand, I miss Boston very much. I have many good memories tied up in the physical space of the city and I miss my friends, my two sushi restaurants, my favorite Italian restaurant, the Harvard Bookstore, the T, and the comfort of living somewhere I could love, horrid winter weather and all. I made sporadic visits while I was in college and lived there for two months this summer, yet I’m so much more attached to the city than I would expect, considering our short acquaintance. I wish I knew how to write about the feeling of comfort, of belonging, of familiarity and rightness that I feel when walking around in Boston or in Rome (to a much greater extent; my feelings for Boston pale beside my feelings for Rome). It’s more than just knowing your way around, it’s more than just liking the architecture or the coffee shop next to school, it’s more than the easy familiarity of the T and the bus routes and even knowing how the buses in Rome jolt over cobblestones fit to make your teeth fall out. It’s how all of those things fit together and how ultimately, the city is a living entity with a pulse and an atmosphere all its own, and finding that that atmosphere fits with your own personality. It’s like clicking again with a best friend or coming home (although I don’t feel that way about my hometown). I wish I could write about that feeling with specifics (the skyline of Trastevere at night, the sight of my favourite Roman bus routes after a year away) and have people still relate to it. Talk of homecoming is all well and good, but it’s abstract.
Up next: a review of Pazzia, an Italian place in SoMa. I have mixed feelings about it and possibly the beginning of an unhealthy relationship similar to the one I had with the Indian restaurant housed in a trailer/diner at school.
