PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE
BERKELEY, CA — Joker and Jester (Keenan and Eddie) and their friend Chris were confronted by a Walmart employee while they were quietly spanging (spare-changing) outside a Walmart in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Union City. The man told the three young men that his boss wanted them to sign a stay-away order for that stretch of public sidewalk. They declined. When Keenan later researched online whether there were local laws against what they’d been doing, he found there weren’t. This is but one small, petty example of how public space is being privatized, corporations thinking they are the law.
Keenan and Eddie, along with many other young people, live on the streets of Berkeley and other cities around the Bay Area. They stay alive by spanging for what they need and sharing with each other. They have nothing and are given nothing by this society, but survive on their wits. They are also part of a conscious movement. Keenan was part of OccupySF for the two years it held ground as an intentional community downtown, bringing together homeless and housed fighters living side by side in tents and in bedrolls on the sidewalk in the name of social transformation.
This movement and its consciousness lives on, expressed on many fronts. The homeless movement is at the heart of it. The homeless-led group, ‘First they came for the homeless’ was born out of the homeless presence and resistance that helped hold down Occupy, and has launched numerous actions and occupations since, one that lasted 17 months. These include tent cities, ‘sit/lie’ law protests, visits to a homeless-bashing Supervisor’s condo, the ‘AssHat’ encampment outside San Francisco City Hall during the billionaire’s America’s Cup yacht races, and many informational chalkings, on both sides of the Bay. Keenan has been part of this from the beginning, and Eddie joined and helped hold down two Liberty City intentional tent communities at Berkeley’s Old City Hall.
Corporate control over the economy, the government and society is fascism. This extends to the question of who owns the public streets, as well as the larger issue of who has rights to what social production creates. Fascism thrives on fear, hate division and enforced artificial scarcity, when all around us is everything we need for a fulfilled life. Cooperation is practiced by a generation of street kids and other youth with no stake in the old way of enforced scarcity. They are seeds of a future that we must achieve if any of us are to survive.
San Francisco poet and organizer Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board, and a founding member of such organizations as the San Francisco Union of the Homeless, Homes Not Jails and 'First they came for the homeless’. Known for her poetry about the streets, her latest collections are Winter Rose, Sign and Holy Eel.
