Essays Examining Xenophobia
by William W. Berry
LETTERS PUBLISHED IN THE BUFFALO NEWS
Wednesday, January 28, 1998
"SURELY ALLENTOWN HAS ROOM FOR EVERYONE"
I have lived in and around Allentown since 1971 and found Arlan Peters' recent letter condemning
human-service agencies so misleading, divisive and mean-spirited that I must respond.The most
glaring inaccuracy is the assumption that the people who need and use these services are not
"residents of the community." The small islands of affluence that pock the area are
surrounded by thousands of people in desperate financial circumstances, who most definitely
need and use these meager offerings. The well-to-do should be rebuilding their sense of moral
obligation to support the less fortunate, as well as rebuilding their fashionable Victorian homes.
Another fallacy is that the functions of those agencies are "incompatible" with the life
of the neighborhood. Why is eating a meal at "Friends of the Night People" any
more incompatible than eating one at "Enchante?" Why is a meeting of the
Restoration Society Social Club any more incompatible than one of the Allentown Association?
The answer lies in the elitist and bigoted nature of the anti-human services campaign in
Allentown. Surely there is room for all of us.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Thursday, April 1, 1999
"ATTEMPT TO KEEP DISABLED OUT OF ALLENTOWN IS SCARY"
The photograph of Erie County Legislator Judith P. Fisher at the Symphony North Apartments
and the accompanying article in the March 19 News took me way back. It is not 1999, but 1963.
It is not Allentown, but Tuscaloosa, Ala. It is not disability, but race. It is not the hollow
stairwells of Symphony North, but the stone steps of the University of Alabama. And it is not
Legislator Fisher, but Gov. George C. Wallace trying to keep people out.
Recently, the anti-social services crowd in Allentown has endeavored to hound services for the
disabled out of "their" part of town. These attacks, cruel enough, have now escalated
into what should be forbidden territory. This attempt to prevent certain types of people from even
living in the neighborhood is very scary. Will it take federal troops to enforce the rights of the
disabled to live in certain sections of Buffalo?
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Monday, February 14, 2000
"CONCERN FOR FIRE VICTIMS SHOULD DECIDE SHELTER PLAN"
The image of a swastika seeping through from the back side of the page distracted me as I read
the Feb. 4 News piece detailing neighborhood and official hostility to the proposed Red Cross
emegency shelter for fire victims. Turning the page for an explanation, I saw at a glance that The
News had printed there a Toles cartoon condemning the Austrian Joerg Haider.
How fitting! Ink intended to stigmatize the Austrian whom The News rightly calls a xenophobe
bleeds through the paper to bring home to inattentive Buffalonians a vision of their own prejudice.
The good news is that we can actually do something about our own ungrounded fears and hatred
of strangers. The tried and true method, of course, is to actually get to know the people we
would put in isolation because they are different and poor.
Commissioner Ryan and Mayor Masiello should go to the Lenox Hotel, talk to the fire victims and
show them as much concern as they do the Allentown crusaders and the wealthy campaign
contributors on Oakland Place.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Monday, June 19, 2000
"NOT EVERYONE OPPOSES NEW RED CROSS SHELTER"
The June 6 News report on reaction to the proposed Red Cross emergency shelter for fire victims
deserves a footnote. Several West Side block clubs that were approached by the
Bryant-Oakland-Summer Association to join the opposition to the much-needed facility have
either refused to do so or withheld judgment.
"Forever Elmwood"'s involvement in efforts to slam the door on the shelter should give
everyone pause. Five years ago, the group hounded Benedict House out of the neighborhood
with a petition campaign based on lies and disinformation. Donn Esmonde's April 12, 1995,
column, "New shelter is caught in a backlash," noted all the nasty details.
This time, "Forever Elmwood" is going after the Red Cross. The group's president
attempts to frighten us when he raises the specter of "...men who are burned out of their
rooming houses who have a substance-abuse background."
I sincerely believe he underestimates the people of my neighborhood. We will not be cowed by
these misleading and cowardly tactics calculated to separate us from our neighbors who need a
provisional helping hand.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Friday, September 15, 2000
"MOST IN ALLENTOWN WELCOME SERVICES"
Donn Esmonde dredged up tired stereotypes and dangerous myths to fill his Aug. 31 column
sympathizing with the plight of Allentown's well-to-do. Belying his "open arms" fairy
tale, as long ago as 1972, Delaware District Council Member William Hoyt incited a "ban
the bums" crusade to rid this area of troublesome reminders of poverty and disease.
It's the old story of the haves and the have-nots. Those who have are uncomfortable around
those who do not. They blame the victims for the problem and try to get rid of them. One of the
tactics they use to achieve this "cleansing" is to induce fear: the "addict"
who will move into the Red Cross fire victim shelter, the "unbalanced" one who stares,
the "ex-con" urinating on your lawn. Allentown is not so far from Sarajevo.
I live on the West Side near Allentown. Social services saturation of this community is a big lie.
It has been repeated so often in these pages by prosperous and resident News staffers that it
has come to be generally believed. While Esmonde juggles apples and oranges, my
impoverished neighborhood cries out for more services, not fewer.
The survey he disparages indicates that the majority of residents would welcome those services.
Presumably, that is because it polled the have-nots as well as the haves.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
AN OUTING IN EVANS
William W. Berry
January, 2000
In the Fall, 1998 issue of Mental Health World, "Turning Around Intolerance"
("Welcome to Allentown") examined the xenophobic basis of the anti-social services
movement in Buffalo's Allentown district. That article concluded that the most effective means of
clearing the pervasive uncharitable atmosphere would be the open involvement of social services
recipients in their block clubs and neighborhood associations. This follow-up piece by the same
author contemplates the motivations and experiences of one person who did just that, although in
a different part of town. It is offered in the hopes of encouraging and informing those who are
understandably fearful of making such a leap.
An Outing in Evans
by William W. Berry
The Town of Evans early today said no to a rehabilitation center for 50 addicts on the Derby
lakefront...After a stormy five-hour public hearing, punctuated by shouting, catcalls, insults and
wild applause by a crowd of more than 250 residents, the Evans Town Board voted unanimously
at 1 a.m. to deny the company a special-use permit...Dr. Douglas Gilbert, an Evans physician
who treats alcoholics, hushed the crowd with an emotional appeal for the project. 'I am an
alcoholic and a narcotics addict,' he said. 'When you talk about what kind of people would come
to this facility, you're talking about me. If rehabilitation hadn't been available to me, I wouldn't be
standing here--I'd be dead.'
Buffalo News, February 20, 1992
Seven and one-half years later, but only fifteen miles away, in Buffalo, Doug Gilbert waits at an
Allentown cafe. He is tall, even seated by the window at the sheet steel table in the wrought iron
chair. He is bearded, the permanently adopted outgrowth of impersonating Meister Eckhardt in
a recent production of his own stage play, Meister Eckhardt Speaks. His wife wanted him to
keep the whiskers. Meister Eckhardt was a thirteenth century Dominican monk who preached
"belonging through detachment, prostration and prayer" to his Rhineland neighbors.
Doug is a Presbyterian minister who is not comfortable confined to the heavy chair, to
predestination doctrine or to a century and land whose preachers are not leaders. His neighbors
are in western New York.
He precociously greets his lunch date by name as the shorter man, whom he has never met,
arrives in the rain and closes his umbrella and the door to the street. Doug has, Doug explains,
looked him up in a twelve-year-old pictorial directory and he hasn't changed all that much. At
Doug's suggestion, and by astonishing coincidence, they had earlier made plans to meet this
day at another restaurant, several blocks down Allen Street, close by and within sight of the
white pickets which still perch rudely at the corner of Main. But that ironical spot was closed for
the week.
After several tries at selecting something they're not "out of," Doug settles on bacon
and eggs; his companion, linguine. The new arrival wants to know what happened after that 1992
meeting and the newspaper publicity. Did the rehabilitation center ever open? What happened
to your practice and reputation? Has there been opposition to similar facilities since? As
strident? Have you any regrets about being so open? Have any of the opponents repented?
What about the fate of others who spoke in favor? How did treatment help you? Why you would
put so much on the line.
Doug responds with his story. He grew up in Middleport, up in Niagara County, graduating from
high school in 1962. Hobart College. Princeton Theological Seminary. A year at St. Andrew's in
Scotland studying the New Testament in Greek. A parish pastor near Corning. Then on to
medical school in Philadelphia, a general surgery residency in Cleveland and neurosurgery
residency in Detroit. Increasing amounts of alcohol and other drugs and always more degrees
and achievements to accompany them. He picked up tobacco smoking from the thoracic
surgeon who mentored him in Cleveland. They would remove a cancerous lung, then break for a
cigarette together before moving on to the next patient. He still smokes.
But the drinking and drugging would stop in 1985. After a marriage and three children and a
divorce. After years of telling himself that he was too smart and too accomplished to be so sick.
And after being told by another woman he loved that he was a drunk and she wanted nothing to
do with him.
In September, 1985, he signed up for the 28-day detoxification program at the Chit Chat
Rehabilitation Center in Pennsylvania. He came out clean and stayed that way. In late 1990, on
the shores of Lake Erie, after five years of misery and meetings, he met a Catholic priest who
talked to him and tried to understand him. Doug was this close to suicide.
Doug told him of the boyhood beatings, the emotional and sexual mistreatment. The cleric
helped him to understand that he had been treating his childhood wounds with alcohol and other
drugs and recommended a five and one-half day family counseling program at Chit Chat. It had
helped others he knew to learn how to uncover these mysterious early afflictions. People who
are paralyzed with fear don't want to drag out these injuries just because they are so affecting, so
consuming, so shaming. But the program would help him to identify his particular curses and
give him some tools to moderate and move forward from their adverse effects.
Desperate, Doug got right on the phone and discovered that the sessions were booked for
months. By confessing to the woman on the phone that he might not "be around" for
the next opening, he convinced her to admit him to the one starting the next week.
That five and one half days taught Doug that his parents were sick, not bad. The experience
made it easier for him to forgive and harder for him to be so angry. He began to understand that
in adulthood he had been replicating his experiences in childhood--hiding and covering up and
avoiding these memories that hurt him so much. He cemented these realizations with three
more years of Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings; with three years of struggling with a painful
past he had not wanted to dig up. Counseling really did save his life.
He now teaches addiction medicine at the University of Buffalo medical school "when it
occurs to them to offer such a basic course." He studies and interprets the Sermon on the
Mount and visits prisons to treat the inmates. He continues to see and treat more conventional
patients. He refuses to do business with HMOs.
Finishing off his omelette, Doug muses on what might have possessed him that freezing night in
Evans to bare his intemperate soul before so many so merciless. He reveals to his still hungry
companion that he had already "lost his anonymity" back in 1985 when he first
sought help and counseling for his addictions. In a fit of irony, the CEO of the hospital where he
was then Chief of Staff "blew him in" to the State Health Department only after Doug
had acknowledged his problem and stopped drugging and drinking. He went bankrupt defending
the charges but managed to keep his license and his patients.
So speaking out in 1992 at a huge public gathering studded with news gatherers risked little
more than the gamble he had taken when he first admitted he was a drunk and a junkie. Then he
chanced his reputation to save his life. Seven years later, getting up to speak out openly for the
recovery center energized him and made him feel invincible just as first acknowledging his
addiction and sickness gave him a chance to stay physically alive. Both times he needed public
affirmation to "fix the brokenness." First his. Then his and Evans'. Why did he need
the audiences?
The healing had to acknowledge the disorder: he hadn't been able to love himself; he had not
been good enough, so he had always sought others' recognition. His addictions, though,
cloaked childhood trauma, reenacting the childhood cover-up each day of his adult life. The
nature of the hurt required secrecy and seclusion. The hiddenness was part of the disability. In
coming to accept and care for himself he still needed the attention of others; hiding these secrets
had gnawed away at his sense of being part of the world. This need to share to stop the private
addiction, was in the Evans crowd that evening folded into and fortified by an external cause: the
bid to salvage an operation whose prototype had actually saved his life by acquainting him with
these realizations.
Even more, this speaking out in Evans was for a facility which was feared and opposed because
"... if the bums get too close, I might have to face those demons in me, also, and confront
those forces and problems in my own life which I'm trying to hide." As Doug saw it, the
opposition that night was submerged in an epidemic of hopelessness which it did not have the
tools to resist. Every one of them supposed that this organization, its bureaucratic creators, its
powerful supporters and its unseemly following, were all out to subvert their individual choices to
live in peace and isolation in a town bordering Eden. For them, that battle, then, represented a
specific outcropping of the smothering malaise of hopelessness which surrounds them and
convinces them that everyone is trying to take away something from everyone else. Then there
was Doug stating, "No, it doesn't have to be this way. It isn't this way. I am one of you
and a place like this gave me my life. This one will give you yours, not take it away." Doug
fought for the life of the rehabilitation center and his community because counseling and then his
community had given life to him.
To join the block club or to speak out at such a gathering is, then, to stage a redeeming drama.
You must acknowledge a problem to begin to work it out. This is about accepting: accepting
the history and the body that combined to bring you to this point. Accepting who you have
become represents an end to covering up those influences; an end to pretending that all those
causes had no effects. If you haven't accepted your past influences, you haven't accepted the
need to abstain because you still want to obliterate them with drugs and alcohol. Maybe you
haven't accepted your need to take medicine to lighten those delusional escapes from your
situation, or perhaps you haven't accepted the need to get some help to balance your
checkbook. If you have accepted yourself, it is impossible to hide that history from the others.
Being open and accepting are part of the same process. If you can't disclose, you haven't
accepted because you are still saying to yourself that what "they" think about you is
more important to you than who you have become.
This is basic Howard W. Campbell stuff. Vonnegut 101. You become what you pretend to
others to be. A prisoner. Think about your pretensions. If you continue to pretend that you've
never suffered these curses you've gone ahead and denied to others that there is anything you or
anyone can do to alter this aftermath you are living through. You have erected a jail.
Predestination rears its debilitating silhouette: to forget and avoid pain, we drink or escape into
delusions and that's just the way it is. To be able, rather, to engineer change, to deconstruct
the penitentiary, to, in Doug's words, experience true resurrection, you must accept and study
the calculus of the past. And you must be willing to move beyond that past.
And it is also about energy and time. Pretending borrows all this space that you would otherwise
be using, naturally and unconsciously, openly and easily, for making the changes and for
understanding your past trauma to make those changes possible. You don't open up to that
new acquaintance who seems so ready to understand because your energies are directed into
your mask.
The good citizens of Allentown lament an "unsightly congestion." Is it possible the
crowd at Evans doesn't want to even see the addicts because each of the group as individuals
has not accepted themselves and each and every person who has admitted a problem and
sought treatment threatens to uncover their disguises? Is the psychological basis of xenophobia,
that "hard-wired" distrust of the strange, related to another hardwired process which
conspires to obliterate the memory of pain? Have we done mischief if we bring that specter
home?
Doug's story and musings have taken his listener into this reflective spiral. He asks Doug if there
weren't any ill effects of the outing in Evans. Doug says no. It was all positive for him. He
doesn't think any of his patients abandoned him. He has earned a deference reserved for the
forthright. What about the crowd? It's as if Doug has circled with his correspondent's thoughts:
"Each and every one of them will be less likely to think the stranger they meet is trying to
take something away from them." And that is because they know Doug has faced his
demons and Doug is familiar to them.
But, no, the rehabilitation center never happened. And no others have popped up. He is not
aware of the fate of any of the others who stood up for the rehabilitation center that midnight in
1992. Not one of the opponents has ever come to him hat in hand. Any gauge to measure the
sum total of Evans' distrust is not so finely calibrated that we will be able to determine the Doug
Gilbert variation the next time such a clinic comes up for debate. But because Doug unmasked
his own struggle in the presence of his neighbors and because the sum total of that fear of
strangers mirrors or maybe even duplicates the aggregate fear of all their own masked and
unaccepted selves, the gauge will certainly read lower next time.
-end-
WELCOME TO ALLENTOWN
William W. Berry
April, 1998, revised December, 1999
Perched rudely at the corner of Main and Allen Streets in Buffalo is a low, white, wide-wooden fence. It blocks a sensible pedestrian short cut across a "community"
garden bidding welcome, the sign says, to the neighborhood known as Allentown. This barrier
intersects the fading footpath at an odd horizontal angle instead of following Main Street's natural
inclination. It is unwelcoming and out of tune and place.
These squat pickets bring to mind the antisocial character of the noisy anti-social services crowd
which has grown up in that part of town. Was there a problem with that logical, diagonal route
tracing the edge of the railroad-tie planter? Why would anyone want to keep the community out
of a community garden? If hating the sight of mud or other aesthetic sensibilities led to this
extreme, certainly paving stones or a boardwalk would be more inviting and in keeping with the
written message.
But maybe its not just the garden. Maybe its a symbol for them too. Maybe someone wants
people arriving by subway from the other side of Main to see this stockade as a sign that they
are not welcome further down Allen. "Welcome to Allentown," indeed.
This half square mile of historic district subsumes a lively jumble of restored wooden Victorian
homes, cracking brick apartment buildings, fly-specked antique shops, tatoo and body piercing
parlors, galleries and coffee houses with grimy windows, party bars and music clubs, ethnic
restaurants, chain drugstores and nursing homes.
It takes in an endearing assortment of Rastafarians and Junior Leaguers, wily crack dealers and
preoccupied Supreme Court justices, cross-dressing social workers, unemployed bartenders,
Vietnamese laborers, white-haired former bikers in motorized wheelchairs, paroled Mafia hit men,
the nearby symphony's janitors and its cellists. All around the Allen-Hospital station and F.
Scott Fitzgerald's earliest home, freshly painted islands of affluence pock decaying tracts of
destitution.
It is true that for several years the good neighbors and their clubs in and around Allentown have
been trying to rid themselves of the Salvation Army, Friends of the Night People, Harbor House
and other programs providing services to the homeless, poor and disabled. The campaign
succeeded in hounding Harbor House out of the area by enlisting the aid of a county legislator to
threaten its funding. Another mental health rights organization, similarly persuaded, abandoned
plans to locate in the city.
The rallying cry for these individuals and their groups has been that there exists an
"overconcentration" or "oversaturation" of these types of helping places in
the Allentown and West Side neighborhoods. The crusade has been quite effective because it is
composed of organized, articulate, affluent and mainly white campaign contributors. Their efforts
have resulted in the creation of a "Permanent Human Services Siting Review
Committee" established by the Erie County Legislature and an ordinance requiring a
"special use" permit for human services agencies seeking to locate or expand in the
city, passed by the Buffalo Common Council and signed into law by Mayor Masiello. The
combination of these overlapping and possibly contradictory bureaucratic requirements has
sapped the energy and depleted the resources of organizations serving the poor and disabled.
Most alarmingly, though, the resulting battery of siting approval hearings has had a tendency to
fan a flickering intolerance into fiery hate.
The virtually explicit purpose of the county legislature's siting review committee was originally to
use the menace of loss of county funding to "encourage" social services agencies to
locate in areas outside of the city's West Side. In fact, the committee has had in place a de
facto moratorium on the expansion or creation of any such agencies on the entire West Side, not
just Allentown. It is packed with neighborhood people and providers of services, but has not,
apparently, until very recently, embraced even a single social services' consumer representative.
Given the witch-hunting atmosphere of the committee's early meetings, it may be, however, that
any consumer representatives have been keeping their affiliations under cover.
The "oversaturation" movement was born in legitimate concerns over crime:
burglaries, thefts, assaults, harassment, and vandalism. Feelings of personal security and
property values have declined in the Allentown and West Side areas. The corroding effects of
disparities in wealth are quite apparent when those disparities stare at each other from across
the street. Playing into those legitimate concerns, however, are primitive attitudes which can
only be described as xenophobia, racism and class antagonism. These insidious forces are
often fed by misinformation and illogic, which can be met with example rather than accepted as
inevitable or dismissed as temporary or insignificant.
Much of the publicity intended for out-of-neighborhood consumption put out by these groups
explicitly disavows a "not in my back yard" mentality. Pointing to the area's historic
reputation for diversity and tolerance, their argument is that there has to be one hell of an
"overconcentration" problem for broad-minded people like themselves to be up in
arms. These social services providers and their clients are so pervasive, they maintain, echoing
legal language, that they are changing the character of "our" neighborhoods.
But, in reality, the backbone of this anti-social services movement is commonplace,
narrow-minded intolerance, and each xenophobic vertebra of it is visible in the so-called
"Overconcentration Study" published approximately five years ago by the Allentown
Association, Forever Elmwood, Greater Linwood Community Organization, North Pearl Street
Block Club and The Irving Place Block Club.
The "study" speaks of "feeding hours" instead of lunch and dinner hours,
when it refers to services provided by Friends of the Night People. This characterization of the
less fortunate as also less than human informs the study's inhuman "solutions":
move the Salvation Army's homeless services and Friends of the Night People's dining facilities
to the Perry Project, because it is in an "industrial" area. If the people in the Perry
Project don't like it, they can move to other housing projects. Shades of apartheid? These
examples pale beside the rhetoric at the block club meetings about "trash",
"those people", and "welfare scum". But the "Overconcentration
Study", itself, borders on hate literature.
Its isolated crime statistics reveal that the "study" does not even establish the fact of
oversaturation in Allentown, much less the entire West Side. The alleged oversaturation is more
an article of faith in the tract. For example, all it does is enumerate police calls and services
provided in a certain area of the city. There is no listing of calls or services provided in other
areas of the city and county, so there is no reference point. In order for anyone to draw any
rational conclusions about whether an area like the West Side is oversaturated, if that is even
possible in turn of the century America, a comprehensive mapping and needs study would have
to be completed. Although the county siting committee commissioned such a mapping study by
Central Referral Services, which has resulted in an illuminating data base and set of maps
pinpointing social services sites, the group has hardly even discussed the methodology for a
most certainly complex needs study.
The five-year old Allentown "study" is still instructive as to the origins and
characteristics of the anti-social services atmosphere in Allentown. It is filled with
mischaracterizations and inaccurate data, generated from flawed premises and lines of
reasoning, which go something like this:
1. Social service agencies located on the West Side attract undesirable non-residents who
commit crimes and depress property values.
2. Therefore, closing or containing those agencies, and discouraging new ones, will reduce the
crime and make the neighborhood more desirable.
There are numerous problems with this analysis. Most egregious is the explicit, unsupported
and unabashed stereotyping: the poor people and disabled people who use these services are
more likely than "us" to commit crimes and hurt others. Additionally, there is the
express elitism, that "we" who don't need these services are somehow more
deserving of what the neighborhood has to offer than those others, those beggars. Related to
this elitism is the meanness and lack of generosity implicit in the reasoning.
More concretely, the reasoning fails because there is no evidence that the existing services are
not used primarily by residents. Additionally, the provision of food for the hungry, shelter for the
homeless, support for mental health recovery and treatment for the addicted demonstrably
results in a reduction in crime. Finally, the physical improvements and regular maintenance
common to the social service facilities actually enhance and strengthen the neighborhood. The
anti-social services, pro-business bent of the block clubs' "plan" holds as an article of
faith that an antique store or specialty shop catering to the healthy and wealthy is a preferred
use over a social service for the poor or disabled. Indeed, of late, perhaps recognizing a fault in
its logic but not its wisdom, the anti-social services movement has initiated a public and cynical
attempt to prevent the disabled from even living in the neighborhood.
How neatly this vision dovetails with the mean-spirited cuts in social services spending
engineered by the right-wingers in Congress. But the study is so short-sighted it does not even
consider the beneficial economic impact of those services, such as rents paid to landlords who
pay property taxes, and lunches and other goods and services bought by employees of those
agencies, or the well-documented crime reduction resulting from the increased level of street
activity associated with the provision of such services.
Is it, perhaps, the very appearance or presence of certain and different types of people which
drives this self-defeating "ban the bums" campaign? Could it be that 1970s refugees
from grim suburbs are, in their middle ages, endeavoring to transplant the uniformity from which
they fled into the core of the city? Portions of the study point to just such an old-fashioned
xenophobia as the driving force:
Anyone familiar with this intersection knows of the
unsightly congestion of people standing at the front
door of this facility all hours of the day and night.
The study is not content with faulty premises and horrifying reasoning, however. It stoops to
deliberate lies, stating, for example:
There are no public schools in Allentown with large
numbers of teenage mothers requiring four separate
parenting programs.
The Jeopardy answer "What is Grover Cleveland High School ?" comes to mind.
While Grover Cleveland is actually a block or two from a narrowly defined "Allentown",
the study goes far afield to find those nasty social service agencies which seem to plague its
neighborhood. Included in its list of culprits, for instance, are a community dining room and also
a T.B. testing clinic located at Elmwood and Lafayette, a good mile up the street from the corner
of Elmwood and Allen.
Clear differences in morality and an obvious lack of human feeling aside, this type of NIMBY
movement based on elitism and exclusion, distinguishes itself from legitimate local opposition to
state-imposed mandates such as nuclear dumps, because it exacerbates the local problem
instead of ameliorating or preventing it. A Martian viewing the oversaturation movement and its
dubious achievements would be struck by the irony: a group of influential "haves"
have convinced their representatives that they are the victims of the "have nots" and
the services provided so begrudgingly to them. The irony is not there so much, but that the
"haves'" transposed characterization increases the antagonism which leads to crime
and the negative perceptions which result in a decline in property values. The quintessential
self-fulfilling prophecy. In the quintessential American city, half emptied of population in the
Fifties and Sixties as a result of the very same intolerant attitudes and perceptions. And this
campaign is being waged in the name of keeping the middle class in the city?
At a witch-hunt of a siting committee meeting three years back, the aforementioned mental
health rights organization's executive director humbly sought the committee's permission to
relocate her small office to Elmwood and Ferry. A vocal Allentown resident, since removed to
pastoral Orchard Park, who happens to be a trust officer at a large, multinational bank, screamed
at her that all "those people" should be out at the old Bethlehem Steel property in
Lackawanna where they won't bother anyone. A whisper, "Don't forget the barbed
wire," heard only by a few, captured the savagery of the moment. The mental health office
ended up in cosmopolitan Kenmore.
Although the committee's origins are mired in intolerance, it was for several years chaired by a
genuinely decent man of the cloth, the former Director of Erie County's Commission on the
Homeless, Daniel Weir. He shaped the siting committee into a forum and, despite continued
funding cut-off threats directed by the committee to organizations such as Harbor House and a
lingering "ban the bums" mentality in the block club representatives, the forum has
deflected some hate and developed a useful product, the said siting data base and maps.
On a chilly, grey April morning, Dan invited a curious visitor into his sprawling yet homey and
cozy offices in one corner of the third floor at the downtown YWCA. He finished tapping an
e-mail message to his twenty year-old daughter in pre-med at Princeton. Then, proud and
protective of his charges, he laid the two-foot by three-foot siting maps out on a conference table.
Seemingly in tandem, the minister and his guest leaned over the charts and Dan explained their
significance.
On one, scores of small red dots, representing the site of each helping service, are clearly
concentrated downtown and snake out from there closely following the yellow paths representing
bus and rapid transit routes. In another, the services are represented by circles of differing sizes
proportional to the numbers of people they serve. The largest ones are downtown. It sure
doesn't look like the evil social services bureaucracy has singled out Allentown or the West Side.
Dan commented that the maps illustrate the providers' sensitivity to their clients' need to be able
to reach the services by public transit. He also ventured his opinion that the maps and data base
from which they were drawn will be useful to the providers in making siting decisions. Implicit in
his comment was a recognition that, given this information, and lacking an overall needs study,
the providers and clients, themselves, who also just happen to be residents of their communities,
are the appropriate assessors of the extent of need for their particular services at a particular
location and that they will be able to perform this assessment more confidently knowing the
location and types of services already being provided. Also implicit in his comment and manner
was a trust he held in the professionalism and good sense of the caring individuals who staff
these organizations.
Hopefully, in the future, the committee, making use of such data and maps, might continue to
evolve toward a roundtable in which neighborhood groups, providers and consumers can
communicate their plans and concerns, moving away from intolerance and bans. Unfortunately,
Dan resigned as Chair in September, 1999. Now, a wealthy county legislator best known for
leading the charge to rid her city neighborhood of these troubling reminders of disease and
poverty has taken over. If possible, the funding blackmail has intensified.
Just prior to Dan's departure, a seasoned defender of the rights of the disabled speculated that
any vision of the siting committee as metamorphosing from a negative to a positive force would
become a reality only if it takes concrete steps to combat intolerance. When pressed, he
sketched out those steps in words to this effect:
First, the local politicians who, for the most part, have been at their worst on this score,
wretchedly pandering to the prejudices of the less eccentric but more vocal and monied of their
constituents, must be educated. Though they have an obligation to principle as well as to their
contributing constituents, the lawmakers must be consistently reminded that there are large
numbers of voters who will not tolerate discrimination.
Similarly, just as it has communicated the neighborhoods' complaints, it is obligatory for the
committee to publicize the sustenance the helping agencies deliver to their neighborhoods:
curtailing crime by cutting at its roots of poverty, disease and inequality, and supporting their
surroundings with cash. Might it yet be possible for the committee to coordinate a media blitz
accenting these benefits as a counterpoint to the neighborhood complaints for which it has
served as a convenient rostrum?
The committee has the power to insist upon documentation of oversaturation and persuasively
question the alleged link between social services and increased crime and reduced property
values. Members can demand that the vigilantes define such terms as "change the
character of a neighborhood." They might even speculate publicly as to the likelihood that
the antagonism and negative publicity generated by the oversaturation movement has actually
caused or exacerbated the evils it claims to be fighting.
The siting committee must work to insure a balance between the numbers of out-of-the-closet
consumer representatives and the neighborhood representatives. Committee members and
observers can also be there to insist that action on any mapping or needs study take into
account public transportation accessibility and convenience, especially for specialized services
which can economically be located in only one place.
The committee would do well to support immediate repeal of the city special use permit
ordinance, which caused such a terrible ordeal for the Harbor House clients and staff, as
redundant at best.
Reduced to fleeing Allentown by legislative funding threats, this model homeless outreach and
drop-in center settled in downtown's northeast corner. Playing to the new neighbors' speculative
complaints and worst instincts, the Buffalo Common Council's majority shamelessly milked the
public hearings required by the local law for personal advancement and denied the special use
permit. Harbor House then challenged the legality of the ordinance, so unforgivably misused, in
Federal Court in Buffalo, as violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act
and state and local laws. Judge Skretny granted a Preliminary Injunction, forcing the city to
allow Harbor House to occupy the downtown site. He found that Harbor House was likely to
succeed in its claim that this application of the special use ordinance was unlawful. A respite!
But inestimable energy had shifted and dissipated; fiscal intimidation still lurked in time to come.
And, finally, to better that time, this same advocate asserts that the committee could work to
dispel the myths and rumors which the "ban the bums" movement needs to survive.
One such myth is that the Friends of the Night People operates the only soup kitchen in the city.
A variation on that myth is that it is the only one that serves an evening meal. Another
particularly invidious concoction is that the provision of services on the West Side somehow
deprives the needier East Side of services.
Other disability rights defenders and committee members, including Dan Weir and the Director of
the County's Office for the Disabled, now forcefully argue that the Committee, with its witch
hunts, must go, because it legitimates discrimination.
But, irrespective of the being and beyond the immediate confines of the siting committee, it is a
visual artist who, with her words, has unveiled a most powerful measure for the rejected to fight
this intolerance and assure that counseling and other services remain and can locate where they
are needed; that, indeed, they may live where they choose. In Out of Order, Out of Sight, Adrian
Piper suggests:
"...that the basic tendency that gives rise to all these areas of repression is the same. I
think that Kant is right about this; there is an innate tendency to categorize, and if we did not do
that, we would experience total chaos. So the basis of xenophobia is innate. It is hard-wired,
and it is impossible to escape.
However, what counts as alien, what counts as fearful and unfamiliar, is entirely a matter of
social context. If one is raised in a social context that has lots of different kinds of people in it, is
very cosmopolitan, then one will not experience fear of other people, no matter how they look. If
one is raised in a situation that is very provincial, very homogenous, in which everyone looks
more or less the same, then it is much harder, because any variation in appearance or dress or
conventions or behavior will be cause for fear until one can grow accustomed to someone who
has that anomalous or different appearance."
If even a few of those who have used these services for recovery from addiction or mental illness,
who have eaten a meal at a soup kitchen or needed help to manage their finances, should join
their neighborhood organizations and block clubs and let their histories and views be known, they
might gradually be able to turn the intolerance around and change the leadership that caters to
bigotry. Social services organizations could encourage this participation.
A veteran of alcohol counseling and the neighborhood observes that this is not a simple task,
especially on an individual level, because of the fear of being labelled a freak. It takes courage to
even attend a block club meeting, much less join the organization, when your neighbors are
speaking out not about what you thought you had heard at first, but about the trash walking down
the street. He imagines confronting the dread and making a point of appearing at those
meetings, thus establishing "ourselves" as part of the community. We can in this
way, in the company of our neighbors, proceed to erode the stereotypes, calm the fears and,
quite possibly, root out that white picket fence.
-end-
SEGREGATING THE POOR AND DISABLED
William W. Berry
May, 2006
HOME "Insight" Article
On June 27, 1995, spurred by cries of over-saturation in Allentown, the Common Council enacted what it called a “Restricted Use Permit” Ordinance, Buffalo’s first zoning restrictions directed specifically at “Human Service Facilities.” Only David Collins dissented. With Allentown awash in primitive fright and snobbery, the Erie County Legislature had, barely two weeks earlier, convened its own “Social Services Siting Committee,” explicitly designed to put these same human services providers through the funding blackmail wringer if they dared to propose West Side locations.
That month the air, itself, seemed over-saturated with hate. At the June 20th Common Council Public Hearing on the proposed Ordinance, block club members shouted down a lone voice objecting to passage of a law targeting the disabled, minorities and the poor. On June 14th, to the loud acclaim of neighborhood association and business group partisans attending the very first Siting Committee meeting, the Deputy County Executive proposed a ban on all new West Side human service sites.
Subsequently, in 1998, denied a Restricted Use Permit after a required and inflammatory public hearing marked by the shameless grandstanding of certain Common Council members, an innovative homeless drop-in center brought suit in Federal District Court, successfully challenging the City’s use of the Ordinance against the center as violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and various State and local laws.
In November, 2002, after an extensive study of the specific operation of the Permit process from 1996 through 2001, the State Attorney General’s office in Buffalo notified City attorneys that the City was applying the Ordinance inconsistently.
In June, 2003, perhaps in response to these broadsides, the Council significantly amended the Ordinance, making the process less political by removing Permit decisions from the Common Council to the Zoning Board, but also placing an impossible burden on human services providers to demonstrate that their presence would not adversely impact neighborhoods. Indeed, the new law replaced a percentage standard for measuring adverse neighborhood impact with a subjective “alter the character” standard, actually increasing the likelihood of arbitrary denials, and exacerbated that perversion by retaining the incendiary public hearing requirement, disguised in the domino of the general Zoning Code.
In April of that same year, after three full years of collaborative study, work and give and take, a coalition of service providers and a handful of their clients, known as the Inclusion Task Force (ITF), organized by HOME Director Scott W. Gehl, had agreed to propose to the City a Siting Ordinance the group had written with an eye to minimizing discriminatory impact on the disabled poor. The organization had considered and agreed with arguments that any zoning regulation aimed exclusively at social service providers and their clients was discriminatory, but opted to work in the real world. Upon presenting the proposal to the Corporation Counsel in early June, the ITF learned of the Common Council’s proposed amendments and scrambled to organize support among the lawmakers. But the Council went its own way.
The Inclusion Task Force kept at it and continued to advocate for their submission to the Council throughout 2003, filing it and bringing it up for discussion before the Legislation Committee. The hallmarks of ITF’s original plan included an accommodating statement of intent, a shift of authority from the Council to the Planning Board, the automatic grant of a Permit if objective concentration percentages were not exceeded, and an optional rather than a required public hearing if the percentages were exceeded.
Invited to “meld” its proposal with the existing Ordinance by the Chair of the Legislation Committee in February, 2004, the ITF went back to the drawing board and, in October, 2004, after the existing Ordinance had expired and was not re-enacted, proposed a “melded” Ordinance, again designed to limit assaults on the disabled and the poor. The melded proposal kept the conciliatory tone, went along with the shift of authority from the Council to the Zoning Board, and replaced the automatic grant with a presumption of “no adverse impact” when concentration did not exceed the “bright line” percentage.
Under the general Zoning provisions, any application to the Zoning Board is subject to a public hearing and the melded version did not change that. In November, the Council tabled the proposal for an opinion by the Corporation Counsel.
The Task Force prodded City lawyers for an opinion on the proposed “melded” Ordinance and, finally, in July, 2005, they responded. An Assistant Corporation Counsel explained that the Ordinance had expired in July, 2004 and that her office would not approve any further such provisions or amendments because State jurisdiction pre-empted local regulation of these matters.
Given these assurances, but also aware of evidence that the City had cynically continued to enforce the expired rules, in August, 2005 the Task Force adopted a “watchful waiting” stance. Certainly no Ordinance was better even than the Task Force’ original version. But the group would protest the City’s continued exercise of non-existent authority and ask the Council’s Legislation Committee Chair to advise them of any attempts to revive the lapsed Ordinance.
And that is just what happened. Echoing Allentown’s 1995 xenophobic outburst, the Parkside area erupted in intolerance when, in February, 2006, a provider of residential chemical dependence treatment sought to locate in a 70-year-old industrial building at Main and Amherst Streets. The Council responded with a resolution to “restart” the extinct Restricted Use Permit Ordinance. But because it had a more human alternative all ready to go and an intact communications structure, the Task Force was able to act effectively.
The group resumed its dialogue with the Corporation Counsel’s office, which now, part of a new regime, felt no longer bound to respect its earlier position that it would not approve such an Ordinance. The Task Force then returned to its advocacy before the Common Council at a public hearing and at a special meeting of the Legislation Committee, called expressly to examine the ITF’s “melded” version of the law. As of this writing, on May 5, 2006, the Corporation Counsel is working on a draft which will, hopefully, ease the discriminatory burden on social services providers and their clients.
The Restricted Use Permit Ordinance, as it existed, spawned numerous afflictions on the provision of services to the disabled poor. Among them were a deplorable tendency toward increased segregation of services into sections of the City in which opposition is muted or non-existent, such as industrial or abandoned areas; an equally dramatic and scary tendency to fan the flames of intolerance by grandstanding politicians and neighborhood residents at public hearings; a confirmed and steady drain on the resources and time of service providers resulting in fewer services provided; and extreme inconvenience in traveling to or total deprivation of services because of inaccessibility.
Inclusion Task Force supporters, including numerous HOME members and Insight readers, can rest assured that their efforts have set some limits on these offspring of intolerance.
-end-
A JOHN BROWN REVIVAL
William W. Berry
May, 2000
"By any means necessary." I had not heard those words articulated outside over a
microphone since a rally rattling the Justice Department in early May, 1971. But here it was,
May 6, 2000, and Ron Daniels, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, had just come up
from New York City and pronounced them. He spoke of shared values in the mid-afternoon sun
in an Adirondack mountain meadow, punctuated by huge gray boulders and the leaning grave
stone of a hero. As the peaks of Marcy and Algonquin emerged from the clouds, he pictured his
audience as a "family gathering."
It sure was a diverse family. Two hours earlier, as I arrived in the mist with hundreds of them at
John Brown's farm after a mile's walk up from Trinity Chapel together, an innocent young white
man, done up in his take on a Union uniform, knife in sheath at his side, saluted me. Before us,
a troupe of teen-aged African-American women dancers quivered and stepped in the grass to
resonating drum beats. Uniformed park rangers swayed to the same rhythm.
Ron called out to us all for a new abolitionism, because "the color line is still there."
He demanded a moratorium on prison construction and the abolition of the death penalty,
illiteracy and the disenfranchisement of 1.4 million non-violent felony convicts. He pleaded with
this family to reverse the attack on affirmative action and asked, "When will we get paid for
the work we did as slaves?"
The occasion was a two-day celebration of John Brown's 200th Birthday, and Ron Daniels
declared, as Ossie Davis had the night before, that "John Brown is smiling today" at
this gathering put together to remember his suffering and to keep his egalitarian spirit alive.
Indeed, the Adirondack-based "grassroots freedom education project" which planned
the event calls itself "JOHN BROWN LIVES!". Martha Swan, the electric, energetic
(and prophetic) organizer of the group, told me earlier that morning that last year JOHN BROWN
LIVES! revived a yearly birthday wreath-laying tradition begun by the Philadelphia NAACP in
1922.
Terry Noe, the serene park ranger who helped arrange the events of the past two years, and
proudly pointed out to me Marcy, also known as Tahawus or Cloudsplitter, and Algonquin, said
she thought the yearly pilgrimage had died out "somewhere around 1978." Swan
agreed that the enormity and influence of Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter had rekindled enthusiasm
for the yearly ceremony. Last year's was "kind of a dry run for this year's 200th,"
she recalled. She intends to carry it on into the future. She will do this to afford activists for
equality the models and examples she believes they need. Sweet home grown music and
singing graced all this year's events and set a palpable tone of life and reinvigoration.
At Trinity Chapel that Saturday morning, after the music, speaker Bob Albrecht, a professor at
Alfred State College in western New York, had anticipated Ron Daniel's "by any means
necessary" sentiments. Though his students had created perhaps thirty posters examining
the varied reactions to the "Old Man's" deeds at Harper's Ferry and Pottawatomie
Creek, all hanging that day in John Brown's barn, he cut to the quick.
"Why are there no John Brown High Schools or John Brown Memorial Bridges in all of New
York State?" he wondered. "Why is there no John Brown postage stamp?"
Then he answered himself: "America's difficulty with John Brown is, very simply, the
violence." He meant, of course, "non-official" violence. The educator then
implored the congregation to understand the context of John Brown's fight to the death against
slavery and its sympathizers.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 permitted a bounty hunter to earn a year's wages by charging any
black person found in the North with being an escaped slave and "returning" that
person to the South. The person so charged had no right to answer. In 1856, southern
Congressman Preston Brooks beat anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner almost to death on the
floor of the U.S. Capitol. He stopped only when his shillelagh broke. When the vote to expel
Brooks from Congress failed, he resigned and was immediately re-elected. Kansas was at war
over slavery and John Brown's son, Frederick, died there, Albrecht informed us.
Dr. Katherine Butler Jones, whose African-American ancestors settled in the Adirondacks, and
called the place Timbucto, had just explained that in 1843, at an abolitionist meeting in Buffalo,
a black minister by the name of Garnett had declared the inability of moral suasion to end slavery
and publicly urged slaves to revolt, reasoning that it was better to die a martyr than live as a
slave. The Garrisonians defeated the proposal by one vote.
For me, her tale revived all the old anti-war movement debates on the role of violence in the work
for social change. The ups and downs began swimming in my head, reminding me that my own
peace with the dilemma came only after I had been physically attacked by Federal agents and
responded in kind, without thinking about it very much at all.
I almost missed Dr. Jones' revealing that Timbucto was the plan of a wealthy abolitionist, Gerritt
Smith, to grant land to black men so that they would be able to vote. At the time of Smith's
Adirondack land grant in 1846, black men in New York could vote only if they owned property
worth at least $250. White men didn't have to own property to have the right to vote. John
Brown, a shepherd and breeder and land surveyor had moved to Timbucto to assist the black
settlers. Later, at the meadow outside John Brown's home, Amy Godine, a regional historian,
would describe the "Dreaming of Timbucto" Exhibition, of which she is curator. It will
open next Spring in the Adirondacks and "set the record straight" on the Adirondacks'
African-American pioneers and the land they needed to own to vote.
Maurice Kenny, the native Mohawk poet, followed Dr. Jones to the pulpit and proceeded to
lyrically and honestly equate religion, liquor and smallpox "blankets soaked in death."
Adding a dose of humor, he observed that he was so excited about his reading, he had
forgotten to brush his teeth.
The previous evening, thirty miles away in another church in Elizabethtown, actor Ossie Davis
had engaged us all by admitting that he was so wrought-up about reading from an 1881 Frederick
Douglass speech in praise of John Brown, he had forgotten to shave. Mercifully, no other
performers owned up to their particular bodily omissions.
Referring to his own extensive FBI dossier, Ossie Davis remarked that "after tonight, the
FBI will assign someone to John Brown. If anyone knocks on your door asking about John
Brown, tell them 'John Brown lives and that he's a grand, brave and good old man.'"
Ossie Davis recited the Douglass speech and got to its heart :
The Harper's Ferry Raid, viewed alone, is an atrocity.
But it cannot be viewed alone, just as Sherman's March
cannot be viewed alone.
Shortly, the steaming crowd of 250 got to its feet in applause. They had listened in tears to
folksinger Peggy Eyres' wonderful and emotional "Mary Brown's Lament," from a
letter written by his wife to John Brown on November 1, 1859, the day she learned he was to be
hanged. They had witnessed Frederick Douglass in the person of Ossie Davis exclaiming,
"They could kill him but they could not answer him."
But for me the most moving point of the evening came a little earlier when Matt Dickerson, an
Elizabethtown high school student, asked everyone a question. He wondered if John Brown had
done what he did at Harper's Ferry, not then, in 1859, but at this time in this place, in a fight for
those who are dispossessed in the here and now, would we execute him? Surrounded as we
were in the Adirondacks by New York's proliferating prisons and its putative death row, as Martha Swan had just observed, no one in that church could have had an easy answer to that one.
-end-
AM I A SLAVE?
"Am I a Slave?" from Vol. 1, No. 4, Nov. 5, 1968
(Cambridge, Mass.) "Old Mole"
Bill Berry
MIT students by the hundreds pour into their student center--not to the fifth floor library, but to the
second floor sanctuary. Instead of checking meter readings with their lab partners, they speak
of how their work is being used, how they are being used. In recognition of their manipulation by
a society which forces them to produce weapons of oppression, in sympathy now with soldiers
like Mike O'Conner, for the first time feeling themselves oppressed, they begin to organize. And
with the prod of Sanctuary, the force of respect for another human being who has given a year of
his life to bring them together, they organize strongly because they organize themselves.
Now, without hecklers at the laboratory door shouting "Murderer! Slave!" there is the
man inside the laboratory wondering "Am I a slave? And a murderer?", answering
that he is and no longer wants to be. There, right there, is a graduate of MIT refusing a job offer
from General Dynamics. Everyone hears the conversations in the laboratories. They feel the
energy of indignation in the halls that were not long ago so very stale. Everyone is affected by
Sanctuary.
A technician at the Instrumentation Laboratory walks into Sanctuary after lunch: "Just
wanted to see what was going on." Mike says he would like to see technicians working on
developing air pollution control and high speed ground transportation rather than improving
Polaris missiles; that is one reason why he is here. The technician: "Yeah. He's right.
But what am I going to do about it?" Mike: "Look at me." The technician is
not really committed to radical change or anything even approaching that. But still, even if just in
the back of his mind, he's aware that someone thinks that what he is doing is wrong, maybe
even evil. He knows that kid up there on the platform is going to spend a year longer behind bars
because he thinks something is wrong and wants to change it. Perhaps he's a bit pissed that
he, a good technician, can't work on the projects he knows to be better for everyone. Maybe he's
saying something to his buddies back at the lab, to his wife and kids.
An MIT second year graduate student in Electrical Engineering, a research assistant, comes to
Sanctuary. Not once during his four undergraduate years at MIT did anyone see him leave his
dorm room except for classes and meals. There are very few people who have ever heard him
say a word. Nervously, he edges up to a discussion group and sits down. The discussion is
among students who have decided to find out just what MIT's defense contracts are; the people
in the group are actually working on these projects. This has never happened before. Our loner
speaks: "I'm a little worried about the work I've been doing." He describes it;
someone says it's probably a guidance system for satellite-launched missiles. An hour later--it's
12 midnight--he walks out the door, still alone, but obviously committed to do something other
than what he's been doing. Someone notices and remarks, "It's too bad he isn't spending
the night." At 12:30, though, he is seen back at Sanctuary--this time with a pillow and
blanket under his arm.
An MIT senior in Electrical Engineering, from Southeast Asia, has just returned from talking with
a group trying to build a liasion with other campuses to communicate the MIT experience. He is
running wildly, ecstatically, around the crowded second floor, snapping pictures of everyone and
everything. He stops to chat with another senior who lived in the same dorm with him freshman
year, to whom he has never said more than hello.
"Isn't this amazing? So many good shots. Going to put them in a book about Sanctuary.
Unbelievable!"
"Yeah. It's good. Everyone's sleeping on the floor together. Never thought I'd see that
here. Actually worrying about what they're doing and how they're doing it, not just doing."
"Remember freshman year? I tried to tell everybody that that war's no good. Nobody'd
listen to me. Now look at this. It's unbelievable. Makes me very happy."
"Me too."
Security lookouts patrol MIT's environs with walkie-talkies, and a boat with ham radio cruises the
Charles on the lookout for Feds. It's 6 a.m. on the security balcony, and three electronics hacks
are doing incredibly strange and complex things to the wiring system of the Sala de Puerto
Rico. They have been working through the night, and have set up seven or eight separate
telephone and walkie-talkie systems to insure that Mike and everyone else will have some kind of
warning if the police come. They are a bit flaky from little sleep and much work, and mutter
about electrical ways of keeping "them" out; yet from them comes an air of
seriousness, recognition of Mike's courageous stand, willingness to do what they know best to
make it more of a success. The hippies are impressed, though bewildered. They pat them on
their backs and get to know them.
On the front steps, a few hours after midnight, a very strange-talking, stranger-looking member of
the Living Theatre tells a crew-cut ROTC cadet why we're in Viet Nam. They actually talk with
each other.
Another electrical engineering student, a Goldwaterman, finds out what the Old Right and New
Left have in common, is impressed, and falls asleep on the marble floor under the steps to the
third floor. The next day, after listening to the Maryknoll priest, and finding out why the United
Fruit Company, the U.S. Marines, Allen Dulles and the CIA insist that we call Guatemala a
"banana republic," he applauds the Guatemalan peasants' efforts to claim the land
and standard of living which they have a right to, sees that the only way they can do this is
through united action and common ownership.
It's bust-scare time, and the Sala is packed with people sitting close together. An MIT professor,
whose wife and children are home asleep because it's 4:30 a.m., intentionally sits in the line
that the Feds would take in getting to Mike. Most of his students don't know that he was arreste
in Alabama for civil rights work in the early 1960's; since then he has been telling them not to let
political activity interfere with their reading of the text. But apparently he has found some new
cause for hope because he has been at the Sanctuary since it started. Hit in the face with
Mike's irrevocable and very dangerous commitment, he has made one of his own.
The bikers are at the security desk, saying that they are there so Mike can say what he has to
say. One of them writes a moving speech telling how he knows things have to be changed.
Students and hippies, puzzled, immediately label them "friendly." After the
rivet-embroidered denims have been around for four or five days, have become a part of the
community, people find out that they are, indeed, friendly.
Finally, again and again, there is Mike. He sees what is going on and is glad he has come. He
continually states that the people of MIT and Boston are doing him a favor; those around him see
what he has done for them. Mike looks and sees that his act of defiance has been validated;
those around him see that act as a lesson in action. The tension between these views is called
rapport; its result is a mutual respect and an inspired organization.
-end-