Relative Liberty

In the time since New York police evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park--formerly known as Liberty Park Plaza--metal barricades have been erected around the site, restricting access and forcing entrants to pass through checkpoints.

I don't know about you, but I just love passing through "checkpoints" to get to a public space. That makes me feel relaxed and happy; checkpoints make me think of sugar plums and fairies.

The ACLU is currently suing for removal of the barricades. This serves as a fine distillation of one of the central dilemmas for me in considering the Occupy Movement, specifically the encampments.

Public space is public space, and the right to assemble and the right to free speech should be inviolable. On the other hand, when you have a teeming encampment of people in a public park, that is going to discourage quite a few other members of the public from taking advantage of the public space. Individual rights to assemble and speak out are always limited by the right of other individuals not to be harmed or have their own rights unduly restricted.

In the case of Zuccotti Park, the question of public space is complicated by the fact that it is technically a "Privately Owned Public Space." In other words, it is property owned by private interests, not the city, and it is treated as a public space in exchange for other zoning incentives. This particular park was created in 1968 by United States Steel. The current owners, prior to the evacuation of protestors, said that the lingering presence of campers posed sanitary hazards. The protestors volunteered to clean it up themselves, but that was never really going to satisfy anyone in the administration, I wouldn't think. It could be that the sanitation question was simply a convenient and plausible excuse for disassembling the assembly.

In any case, it is telling that people exercising their right to assemble and their right to free speech triggered the construction of barricades to limit access to the space. How fitting it is that the park is no longer called Liberty Park Plaza--the name was changed to honor the chairman of the current owners of the property. I find that morbidly amusing.

Regardless of whether or not the Occupy movement has a right to monopolize public--or quasi-public--space by camping there, I think common sense should be used instead of metal barricades. If you are going to say that the Occupy protestors are ruining it for everyone and preventing others from using the space, you can't turn around and fence off the space. That doesn't work from an ethical standpoint.

How about letting groups pay for a permit to utilize the space? The money--which would need a rigorously transparent accounting process--could be used to maintain the space and provide proper facilities and maintenance. Or maybe make a part of the permit price serve as a deposit; that would encourage the protestors to rigorously self-police and attend to any disruptive elements.

Or maybe it is time for the Occupy movement to turn its attention to politics, like the Tea Party. Look to promote candidates for office to express your ideas through political channels, although this does not mean that protests should be stopped entirely. Any channel to bring attention to inequality should be utilized to the fullest. You just have to figure out when one channel is no longer useful, or when you start to harm your cause by persisting in the same actions with the same results over and over, especially when you start to lose the sympathy of the public.

New Year's Resolutions, Part II: Revenge of The Resolutions

I do love making checklists. For someone who is as disorganized as I tend to be--I have a "nest" of books next to the bed--I get a strange thrill from checking things off a list. I'm so entranced by the process that I will make up tasks for the sole reason of adding them to my iPhone Reminders, and then checking them off when done. I'll even set a reminder to go grocery shopping WHILE IN THE GROCERY STORE. And yesterday, when I figured out how to add a Google Calendar app to my iPhone that would let me remotely update my shared calendar with Marina, I may have gotten a little carried away.

"3 p.m. Devin finishes lunch." "3:15. Devin walks towards home." "3:30. Devin checks out a high school soccer game."

"4:15. Marina considers eliminating Devin's admin rights to the calendar."

Okay, none of those updates actually happened, but they COULD have.

In the spirit of making more checklists, then, I will hereby present a few more resolutions that are perhaps a little more serious/sincere than the last set. You may say that it is a bit self-absorbed to post this online, but what is a blog of resolutions but a very public checklist?

1) Write and/or submit one poem or story every month.

I'll even create a spreadsheet to track what I've submitted, when and where, and when it is rejected. I might even include a column for items that are accepted.

This may not sound like much, but it is a start. I can't exactly go from zero to sixty in terms of submitting writing. I'm not a Ferrari. I'm more of a classic Volkswagen Beetle: a little round in shape, a little meek looking, but strangely hip and capable of prompting passing children to slug each other in the shoulders.

2) Actively research one new question/subject a week to learn something new, especially something that could tie into a story.

The best stories seem true to life because the author can provide exacting descriptions of processes, technology, religions, etc. Neal Stephenson, for instance, author of Snow Crash and the new Reamde provides so much detail on various technical and cool and geopolitical topics like computer hacking, online role-playing games, Russian gangsters and MI6 and other spies, that I have no idea how he had time to acquire such a breadth of knowledge and still write so many novels.

There's one question that occurred to me right there. What is the origin of the word breadth and how did it come to symbolize width? Was a loaf of bread once considered a standard unit of measurement? And if so, what kind, sourdough or wheat?

Actually, no. From Dictionary.com:

Middle English breadeth, breth, from brede breadth (from Old English brǣdu, from brād broad) + -th (as in lengthe length)
First Known Use: 15th century

In the spirit of seeking knowledge, I'm going to the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum this afternoon for the first time, so that I can learn a little more beyond the difference a wave in the ocean and a Wave in a sports stadium.

I also want to know what the heck that metal cap in the rock is that I saw on my run this morning, down near where the waves break, which apparently shoots water way up in the air in narrow streams. From a distance, I thought there was a spouting whale at the bottom of the bluff. I can only speculate it is something intended to prevent erosion, since it sits below a ridge of sandbanks. Maybe it's diverting some of the force of the waves?

I'm coming to the conclusion that "What the heck is that?" is a very promising start for a short story or some piece of non-fiction.

3) Run/walk/jog along West Cliff Drive every other day.

This one is important enough to make both sets of resolutions. And so far so good. I ran again this morning at 8 a.m., past the breaking waves of a ridiculously gorgeous ocean view that as always stands in for a deity in terms of my spiritual needs. I was able to run a little further this time, with a little less pain. If that's not a good way to measure progress, I don't know what is.

Bring it on, 2012. I'm ready for you now.

New Year's Resolutions

I'm a relaxed person, as a general rule, except in those situations that demand urgent action, like screaming at the TV to help my team win a crucial game. New Year's Resolutions are not such a situation.

Hey, most resolutions are not something that will be satisfied in a day, so why rush to craft resolutions on one particular day that just happens to be used--by general consensus--to denote the beginning of a year? Our current calendar is not same one that western society has always used, nor is it the only calendar in existence now. There is nothing inherent about January 1st that marks it as the absolute beginning of an objective year.

All that goes to justify why I've waited until now to come up with some resolutions.

1) This week I will delete my MySpace account.

The spur to eliminate this connection to News Corp. was not the voice-mail hacking scandal in England. Nor was it the long slide into profit-mongering in the guise of journalistic buffoonery by Fox News. No, the straw that really irritated me into scratching MySpace was the attack on the Muppets.

You just don't attack the Muppets.

It will be a big sacrifice to eliminate MySpace, but sometimes you have to take a stand for a principle. Never mind the fact that I haven't logged in to MySpace in two years. Nor the fact that I haven't heard anyone mention MySpace in a really long time. And never mind the fact that there seems to be some shared login options between MySpace and Facebook. Just accept that this is a big deal.

2) Speaking of Facebook, I resolve to log in to Facebook no more than once a day.

Okay, twice a day.

I spent my day off yesterday running, walking along the glorious Santa Cruz coastline, reading and writing. I realized that I could do this even on my work days, if it weren't for Facebook. Facebook tends to suck up a disproportionate amount of my non-work time. If I'm going to ramp up my writing to where I would like it to be, I will need cut down the amount of time I spend on Facebook.

So twice a day will be my limit for checking Facebook. That doesn't include the times when I have a comment or link to post, because obviously those don't count as non-productive log-ins.

3) Speaking of running, I resolve to run more, but always BEFORE having coffee and a bagel. I mean, ouch, that hurt. Actually, running more is not a relevant term. I will just resolve to run. You can't run more when the baseline is zero running.

Not that the fact that I haven't run in a year or so is the real reason why I got so winded so quickly yesterday. It was totally only the fact that I had coffee and bagel calories weighing me down.

4) Speaking of living in Santa Cruz, I resolve to never play the bongos. No further explanation needed. And you're welcome.

I think those are quite enough resolutions to be getting on with.