Of Birth and Death: Occupy Tacoma Nearly Triples Nonviolent Turnout, Marches 3 Miles thru Mostly Supportive Bystanders, Takes Over Park; How This Event Painfully Signals the End of My Life as a Photojournalist

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Explanatory details in “Visual Thinking.” (Click on image to see it full size.)

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(I filed the following report with Reader Supported News to accompany videotape linked from the Occupy Tacoma website, occupytacoma.org. Some of its information is thus duplicated by the “Visual Thinking” piece, which I wrote a few hours earlier.)

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TACOMA – A righteously angry but adamantly peaceful group of Occupy Tacoma demonstrators swelled to an unofficially estimated 700 persons Saturday – nearly three times the number who took to the streets here in a week ago in solidarity with the now-international Occupy Wall Street movement.

Saturday's participants marched three miles past overwhelmingly supportive pedestrians and motorists to rally in the center of this mid-sized industrial seaport city. Declared occupation of a nearby park, with about 20 people staying overnight, soon followed.

As of late Sunday, the authorities had not attempted to evict the occupiers, though a single Tacoma police officer was reportedly monitoring compliance with safety and sanitation measures.

Saturday's demonstrators originally numbered about 400 at their mobilization point, the aptly named People's Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the main thoroughfare of Hilltop, a dominantly African-American neighborhood at the crest of the high ridge to the west of the Puget Sound waterfront.

Including a cross-section of the U.S. “99 Percent” – jobless and employed, young and old, female and male, persons of color, First Nations people, veterans, organized labor – the marchers' ranks swelled as they drummed and chanted their way down Tacoma's Alpine-steep streets.

Picket signs declared the theme of the movement: “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out”; “When Texas Executes a Corporation, I'll Believe It's a Person”; “If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention”; “Think Robin Hood”; “Occupy the World”; and the ubiquitous “Tax the Rich.”

Despite an estimated population of about 195,000 people, Tacoma was a relative latecomer as Occupy Wall Street activism spread to Washington state. Bellingham, Olympia and Seattle occupations were already established when Tacoma joined in, but since then the local movement has quickly made up for lost time. As measured by participation, public support in Tacoma has nearly tripled in the past week.

According to The News Tribune, the local daily, the official crowd estimate was “more than 400.” The initial demonstration a week ago turned out an official 200, an unofficial 250.

With Occupy Tacoma and its statewide kindred now endorsed by state and local labor councils, Saturday's demonstration included a strong union presence. Teamsters, Tacoma Education Association, United Food and Commercial Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union were among the organizations visibly represented.

The demonstration was several hundred feet long, but marchers obeyed all traffic signals. Though banks and government buildings are closed on Saturdays, demonstrators chanted at several such locales in symbolic protest. They also chanted in support of UFCW pickets at City Grocery, a new but avowedly anti-union downtown Tacoma supermarket that caters mostly to the immediate area's upscale condo-dwellers.

But the state's elected officials were notably absent from the demonstration, despite the vast majority – governor and legislators alike – are Democrats who claim to serve working-family interests. Likewise Tacoma City Council members, officially non-partisan but mostly Democrat-affiliated, none of whom attended.

One reported exception was State Rep. Laurie Jinkins, whose legislative district includes both upper and lower income neighborhoods in Tacoma proper. Mike Collier of Tacoma's First Methodist Church, one of the event's organizers, said Jinkins “walked briefly” with marchers as they left People's Park.

Three hours later and immediately after the downtown rally, a group of about 200 demonstrators – all chanting the movement's signature slogans of “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out” and “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” – marched along Pacific Avenue, Tacoma's Main Street equivalent, to a small, nameless but formally landscaped park adjacent the Washington State History Museum.

Once there the group declared the tract “Occupation Park,” stated their intention to remain indefinitely and chanted accordingly: “Our Taxes/Our Park.” The land in question is about 100 feet wide by about 200 feet deep, with the shorter dimension fronting on Pacific Avenue and its renovated Alaskan Gold Rush-era buildings.

Then came what were probably the most poignant vocalizations at Saturday's events: impassioned individual statements in support of the Occupation, none about ideology, all about grievances and hope:

“I've got three grandkids,” said Kat Jeter, an OT facilitator, explaining she was there to “create the world we want for all our children.”

“I make less money now than I did before I got my degree...I graduated into a multinational corporate nightmare,” said another Occupier.

And then there was the young woman, her golden-brown hair cut in neat but obviously home-coiffed bangs, who said she is 16 and both her parents have been out of work “the last four or five years,” with the result her entire family has been forced onto welfare.

But now the state of Washington – where Democrats and Republicans alike fervently believe the rich should live forever tax-free – is savagely slashing its welfare spending, just as the plutocrats demand.

“I'm here,” the somber-eyed teenager said, “to make sure everyone in my family is fed.”

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Visual Thinking: the Death by Old Age of the Best Part of Myself

UNFORTUNATELY, THOSE WHO came to OAN anticipating photographs of Saturday's Occupy Tacoma events are to be disappointed.

Oh how I yearned to have a camera in my hands throughout the entire demonstration – and never more than when the young woman declared she joined the Occupation in an effort to ensure her family will be fed.

Instead I am embarrassed to offer only the sort of meaningless greeting-card garbage we see above – early autumn color in Tacoma's Wright Park, a typical Ansel Adams cliché, the visual boredom that passes for “real photography” here in the nyekulturniy Pacific Northwest, where the nature-photo cult rules in zero-tolerance orthodoxy. The above image is thus the very sort of picture I instinctively deplore, especially whenever it is smugly pronounced “art” in opposition to the alleged “pornography” of any pictures that dare portray the human condition.

Of course I shoot nature pictures too – witness the above, a scene adjacent the old-folks housing in which I live – but such photography for me is only a form of mental masturbation, never serious work.

And now, due to physical limitations, it seems to be the only photography of which I am capable.

Though just as the above report implies, I was there for all of Saturday's demonstration – our mobilization in aptly-named People's Park; the three-mile protest march down the painfully Alpine-steep grades of the streets and sidewalks that climb the Cascade Mountain foothills around the Tacoma waterfront; the rally on the vast and forbidding concrete barren of Tollefson Plaza (which is surely the most architecturally unfriendly public space on this planet); finally the subsequent occupation of a nameless but attractively landscaped park adjacent the Washington State History Museum.

But my crippled, legally disabled 71-year-old body – a mass of post-demonstration pain when I went to bed last night and still sorely aching after nearly 12 hours of sleep – could not bear the extra weight of cameras.

Hence I could not shoot even one photograph.

Hence too, as a dark overlay downpressing my bright joy at the demonstration's political and personal success – the political fact we nearly tripled our public turnout in only a week; the personal fact I was able to fully participate in an ongoing event I had deeply feared would prove too physically strenuous (and yes my associated pride at having gone home still afoot and not on a litter) – there is nevertheless the infinite gloom of realizing my work in photojournalism is finished.

Photography was, as I have said before, the one guaranteed passion of my life, my only reliable entry to the Zen ecstasy of what Alan Watts called “at-one-ment”: that seemingly magical loss-of-ego (and thus of all left-brain distractions), the impossible-to-describe state the Japanese label satori, an ineffable unity with the world at large in which all distinctions between self and other momentarily vanish.

We photographers are modern silversmiths in the ancient Druidical sense – vessels of the Muse – and the power of our magic (which is really Muse-magic) is the choreography of light and shadow. When we are at our very best, we are not merely photographers alone but the living union of photographer and subject, union with camera and light and shadow and the air through which the light and shadow dance and with the dance itself, infinity as framed by the viewfinder: human reality, the fierce defiant expression in a woman's eyes and the bewilderment on her daughter's face; the justified anger reflected in a man's clenched hands, one fist clutching a protest-sign, the other fist raised in the international gesture of Working Class solidarity; the tight-lipped contempt of the plutocrats, their subtly nose-high glare identical whether female or male; the concern and yes sometimes fear in the body-language of our Working Class sisters and brothers in the police and military organizations the plutocrats send against us. Such is the substance of the photographs that might arise from such an event as Occupy Wall Street and its rapidly growing global daughter Occupy the Planet.

But I exposed not even one frame of film yesterday. I knew participation in yesterday's three-mile event would push my physical endurance to its limit – that if I were to carry my cane plus the essential high-energy snacks and required medications and a canteen of water and a down vest against this climate's penchant for sudden chills and a poncho against the omnipresent threat of rain, I could not possibly bear the extra weight of even one camera, much less the battery of photographic equipment required to record an event of this magnitude: three bodies with shorter lenses – 28mm, 50mm, 100mm – one body with the 200mm. Which prohibition of course meant I could not photograph at all.

It was an odd feeling, awkward and disturbing, to participate in a demonstration I was not also recording on film. Perhaps, I had told myself at the beginning, I will finish the event reassured that next time I can bring my cameras. But the opposite is what happened.

I watched the women and men with cameras as they danced the Dance of Photographers – climbing atop walls, hanging from lamp-posts, kneeling in the street, lying prone on a sidewalk, capturing a telling instant with preternaturally fast perception, then darting ahead for a classic long-shot of the entire demonstration (its ocean of placards like a froth of waves atop the muscle-straining descent of South 13th Street: “Tax the Rich”; “Think Robin Hood”; “End Corporate Greed”; its sea of faces, mouths shaping the Occupation's signature chant: “Banks got bailed out/we got sold out”). I watched and envied and yes wallowed in self-pity because I knew just what pictures were being made. I could see them in my mind's eye, exactly the pictures I would have made, not just because I have made such pictures so many times before, but because – ultimately – my mind is still the mind of a photographer. And now I must learn to live with the fact my body has betrayed me. As I watched the photographers work, it was as if my every cell wept silently and secretly, mourning the undeniable death of the only encounter this life has ever offered of truly dependable love.

Nor can writing fill the resultant void.

Yes I can string words together in compelling sentences, yes I can sometimes wax genuinely eloquent, yes my keyboard is occasionally blessed (as my camera often was) by the Muse herself. But nothing – neither Muse-power nor medication – can eradicate the mortifying stigma of dyslexia, the fact that no matter how well I might craft a sentence or build a paragraph or structure an entire composition, my defective brain will invariably betray me, nullifying even the most profound thoughts with the discrediting idiocy disclosed by a dropped or doubled word.

Writing for me is thus always underlain by terror – by gut-wrenching fear of revealing I am a moron, the theme of my teenage years bespoken innumerable times by an aristocratic tormentor named Mike Kennedy: “some people say ignorance is bliss; I say Bliss is ignorant,” a bitter truth he sneeringly repeated ad infinitum like a curse. And the echo of his condemnation has lurked beneath my writing ever since, but it was kept in check by nicotine until the middle of my 55th year. Now since 23 September 1995, the date I quit smoking cigarettes, it is fear a thousand times more intense. And now after 16 years it is obvious I will carry its awful intensity to the grave – the fear remaining just as oppressive as it was my first day without nicotine, which as a neurotransmitter is the one sure dependable albeit momentary amelioration for dyslexia.

For me, this fear and its implicit struggle was the primary difference between photography and writing. The former, even thwarted by the fire, was always an act of passion (and often pure love), forever beyond such egotistical considerations as fear. The latter is (and because of dyslexia will forever remain) a kind of fear personified, a doorway to the self-loathing that is mine when I discover I have (again and invariably and despite long hours of careful editing) destroyed my credibility with (yet another) dyslexic fuckup.

Hence even as I celebrate the success of Occupy Tacoma – of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Planet – I mourn the death of the one and only part of my creative sensibilities I ever dared trust and therefore truly cherished. And no, I will not apologize for this threnody. As William Faulkner wrote in The Wild Palms – in my judgement Faulkner's all-time best work, an epic of love that embodies from beginning to end Robert Graves' assertion “there is one story and one story only,” Faulkner's closing line amongst the most memorable in all English literature: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

LB/16 October 2011

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