Paradigm shift

(or "How Food Not Bombs Could Save the World")

It's Sunday morning and I have been meaning to write about Friday night's Food Not Bombs picnic ever since I returned from the park that night. The problem is (as it always is with those life-changing Zen moments) that words are pathetic symbols for capturing experiences. The best writers can draw you in close enough to the building that houses the experience - they can make you peer through the window at people interacting and communicating and just being - but you can't smell it or taste it or live it yourself. You can only beat your wings furiously against the glass and scream "Why don't they see me? Why don't they let me in?" And then the book ends, the words end, and you go to sleep and wake up to whatever unfulfilling thing you have to do the next morning.

Yet still I am compelled to try, so here it goes...

When we got to the park on Friday night and started to unload the food and picnic supplies, it was pretty quiet. We were told last week that it was First Friday in downtown St. Pete, a night on which the downtown stores open up their doors, put meaningless consumer crap out on the sidewalk and encourage the general public to purchase it in order to alleviate their boredom and ennui. According to the cop who told us this (although not using the same words, as you might expect - I believe she called it a "street festival"), the homeless frequently attend First Friday because it typically falls on a day immediately following the receipt of Social Security checks and they go, we are told, primarily because copious quantities of alcohol are involved. (How this makes them different from the "I just got paid" white-collar drunken executive types is not immediately clear to me.)

At any rate, there were not as many homeless people there as we had seen during our past two picnics - but then the kids started to arrive. Some were street kids, some were not. They all knew about Food Not Bombs and word had gotten out that it was back in St. Pete after a long hiatus. Some had been waiting all week for it, and judging by the number of e-mail inquiries we had received, we had expected quite a few to stop by, but there was NO WAY I could have anticipated the numbers. These were numbers most local anti-war groups would die for. But let's get past the numbers game, because that isn't what Food Not Bombs is about.

What Food Not Bombs is about is community - and what a weak and watery word that is to describe the energy, the enthusiasm, the ideas, the spontaneity, the absolutely in-your-face welling up of life from deep within whatever is left of the earth that refuses to bow to the Corporate Master or to accept the old bourgeois tenet, "That's just the way things are. Now take your shackles like a good little drone and go off and play with the other nice little worker bees."

And some of the homeless we have seen in past weeks do eventually come. And at the end of the evening, here is what I see and hear:

There is Tracy talking to GW, an older African-American homeless person who is, at the very moment I walk past, quoting Immanuel Kant. And over here, two young men, who have driven down from Pinellas Park to help, are sitting on the ground discussing music. There is a cluster of about 30 more kids in front of our table, also sitting on the ground with Tracy's two little ones weaving in and out among them. Jim, from our anti-war group, is deep in conversation with Cindy, another volunteer and probably the only other person besides my husband and a few of the homeless people, who is anywhere near my age. They are joined by Sean from Texas, newly released from prison, who stopped by to see what was going on and spontaneously started to help us serve drinks. Logan is huddled off next to the light pole with Josh, an incredibly intelligent and resourceful young man who is telling us about ways we can purchase abandoned houses from the city for $100.00 ($100.00! Who knew?) in order to create a space for a community kitchen. They are envisioning an infoshop, a squat, a community garden, a meeting space, and all the things people used to take for granted in a neighborhood before the modern concept of suburbia squeezed the life out of it, painted it beige and walled it off. Someone zips by on a skateboard, a dog barks, grass and trees and people and laughter and ideas all weave together and I just can't stop smiling.

I have some of the best conversation I have had in my life as I move from cluster to cluster talking about books, music, politics and sharing ideas about ways of living that are free and honest and cooperative. I don't think about my job - not once - or about how to grow the movement or pay the bills or stop the war, because all at once everything is just obvious. It's there and it's always been there - it's us who have moved away from the solutions, not the solutions that have moved away from us in some endless sort of shell game.

And at 48 years old, I am finally in a space where I don't wish I were somewhere else. For a few hours anyway, I am free.

In my last journal entry, I commented on the fact that America does not have a "homeless problem." I now see that more clearly than ever. After Friday's picnic, it seems more that the people who have homes are the problem, largely because they don't ever come out of them except to consume like mindless locust and then return from whence they came to admire the stuff that they purchased and wish they were somewhere else. That's because "stuff" is as weak an analogy for life as words are. Their stuff keeps them perpetually on the outside of where they want to be, furiously beating their wings and screaming "I want in!"

What is mystifying to me is that they will defend their right to do that to the death. Why don't they just open the fucking door?

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