Synergy: of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health Seminar, Fr. William J. Bischel and an Episode of Personal Revolution

Fr. William J. Bischel SJ, center, an often-imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience, has been with Occupy Tacoma's quest for socioeconomic justice since its beginning. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to see it full size.)

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THANKS TO THE curious synergy of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health workshop entitled “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” and Fr. William J. Bichsel SJ, on 21 October 2011 I experienced a genuinely life-changing epiphany. But to explain what obtained in the wake of that rainy Friday and how it came about, it's necessary I back into the story, working from society to self and thus from the political to the personal.

Long and painfully aware of the overwhelming negativity with which capitalism teaches us to despise ourselves whenever we become nonprofitable, I assumed my knowledge was the best possible defense against this mind-numbing, soul-killing brand of psychological warfare. But it turned out my awareness was far less effective than I thought it was.

As I discovered, it seems I am as vulnerable as any other low-income person – senior, disabled or chronically unemployed – to the self-destructive messages with which capitalism deluges us when our Ruling Class masters deem us no longer exploitable for profit.

Though the form of these messages varies in accordance with the targets at whom they are aimed, the content is invariably the same: the zero-tolerance mandate to somehow elevate ourselves by our proverbial bootstraps (no matter our economic feet were amputated long ago), or subtle hints we must dutifully end our own lives – in either case sparing ourselves the odium of becoming parasites while relieving society of the burden of our alleged laziness.

That the term “suicide” goes unspoken in such declamations merely proves how effectively the message is reinforced by advertising, the core medium of the most viciously social-Darwinist society in the industrial world. Advertising is the goad that forces us to run the rat maze, its motivational impetus traceable to our first encounters with playground bullies, schoolhouse tyrants and boringly pedantic teachers in classes designed not to stimulate but to subjugate.

Within the resultant (definitively capitalist) context of lockstep conformity, we are all challenged to prove our usefulness – to prove it every minute of every day – but for those of us who have lived long enough to become elderly, there are additional and often increasingly difficult requirements. We must constantly prove our physical and mental abilities, and – more importantly – we must demonstrate our relevance: all this as capitalism tries to drown us in a quagmire of rejection that is equal parts terror and contempt.

The source of the contempt is obvious: it is capitalism's malicious dismissal of anyone who is neither rich nor famous. The terror's origin is more complex: our society's uniquely bottomless fear of death – the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation taught us from birth by infinitely sadistic Christianity – this compounded with capitalism's induced fear of personal failure and its carefully acculturated fear of the Other: specifically anyone whose being or ideology might suggest alternatives to capitalism and capitalist tyranny.

While the Ruling Class has always been hostile to seniors (as it is to all groups it rejects as unprofitable), in recent years it has expanded its definition of Other to include native-born U.S. citizens – any of us much past our 50th year. This is because the United States in which we spent our formative years is so alien to the United States today, our age marks us as potentially dangerous agitators – men and women who remember when liberty, though always definitively White and therefore sorely limited, was nevertheless infinitely more than Bush-Obama political theater and Big Lie slogans.

Surely it is no coincidence – now we can truthfully say of today's United States “this is not the country I was born in” – the label “elderly” is redefined, no longer just synonymous with “useless” but now a condition definitively bad, even shameful, with an accompanying burden of self-doubt (and often self-hatred) that assures our submissive silence as we are segregated into ghettos called “senior centers” and “senior housing.”

And though I knew all this – though it was the core theme of the commissioned book upon which I labored from 2006 through 2008 (the manuscript ironically entitled “Proof of Relevance” but now doomed to eternal obscurity by a bratty estate war between the subject's adopted children) – my knowledge was not sufficient to protect me from absorbing capitalism's core message I had turned not just useless but hopelessly enfeebled the moment I lived past retirement age.

Admittedly I am physically disabled, officially so, crippled by steady deterioration of spinal injuries inflicted on me 33 years ago by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled habitual drunken drivers, crippled too by a no-cartilage knee inflamed by arthritis, with both disabilities radically worsened by the seemingly inescapable obesity that has burdened me since I quit smoking 16 years ago, and those maladies intensified by high blood pressure and heart problems.

But until I began seeing myself as genuinely “old” and (therefore) truly “useless,” my core self-concept remained one of strength not weakness: my internal dialogues were about how I might prevail, not about how I might surrender.

Enter Group Health – the Puget Sound health care cooperative of which I am a voting member – and its “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” workshop, the underlying theme of which duplicates (and therefore resurrects) that of my former internal dialogues, the how-might-I-prevail paradigm that was mine before capitalism taught me to think of myself as “old and useless.”

Also enter, by whatever astounding synchronicity so often seems to govern my life, first Occupy Wall Street and then Occupy Tacoma: each another variant on the how-might-I-prevail paradigm, albeit this time in definitive collectivity: We the People, and How Shall We Prevail and above all else Solidarity.

Partly because I long ago recognized activism as the best analgesic (a point I have made repeatedly in the three Group Health workshop meetings I have had time to attend), though mostly because I see in OWS and OT the revolutionary democracy to which I (and my father before me) were so fervently committed, I gave myself over to OT as best I could, predictably via its Media Work Group.

Thus began my re-education: specifically the process of learning the difference between genuine physical limitations and the imaginary limitations imposed by capitalism.

At first I believed I could not participate in demonstrations. Then, because I somehow overcame my fear of collapsing in exhaustion midway through a three-mile march (or worse the public mortification of falling prey to heart problems and so disrupting the entire event), I marched and chanted, but dared not carry the added weight of even a single camera. Not surprisingly, I was soon filled with bitterness and self-pity at the sight of young photographers doing exactly what I used to do: the ineffably passionate Dance of the Photographers, for which see last week's essay.

A few nights later during a General Assembly meeting at Occupation Park, where OT maintains its 24-hour presence in downtown Tacoma and coexists in genuine harmony with police and passers-by, I encountered Fr. Bischel. 

I knew him of old, from one of those interludes in my life I tried to be a practicing Catholic but concluded, as always, I am far too damaged to find spiritual sustenance in any organized religion. I had no idea he was in the park. I merely suggested him as the best possible local resource on the politics of non-violence, only to hear his laughing voice say “Loren is my campaign manager” and to discover amidst my own surprise (and a great deal of gentle chuckling) he was standing directly behind me.

Fr. Bischel – Bix to his friends and colleagues – had been sleeping in the park each night, lending OT his formidable presence as an internationally renown, often imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience. 

Now I wanted to photograph him there or in some other OT environment, not the least because Bix is 86 years old and I recognize him as a true Bodhisattva, embodiment of the wisdom of I Ching, particularly the First Hexagram, Ch'ien (the Creative), Nine in the Fifth Place: “Thus the sage rises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes.”

But to follow him with my own eyes I would have to attend Friday's demonstration. Hence again the vital practice of asking myself how might I prevail. I'd take one camera (a Pentax MX); two lenses (100mm and 28mm SMCPs); a pocket full of Fujicolor 800; a Vietnam-era GI poncho to protect my equipment from the rain; an Ace bandage for my knee; my cane; and – to lighten the load – an 8-ounce flask of water rather than 32 ounces in my 1945-vintage GI canteen.

That image above is Bix with two of his friends as seen through the 100mm lens.

I made a total of 48 pictures of the demonstration – literally a demo in a deluge – of which at least five are worth showing, with one more probably as much a portfolio piece as the portrait of Bix. But the Blogger software for posting portfolios is not just difficult but user-unfriendly, with instructions so vague its operation requires at least the knowledge of a professional Nurd, and – techno-moron that I am – I dread the requisite hours (and quite possibly days) of technological hassle and unavoidable public embarrassment necessary to figure out how to make it work.

Meanwhile though I have indeed prevailed, at least to the extent of learning how to continue working in the medium I love the most.

And hobbling nearly five miles for OT – about two miles last Friday – has clearly exorcised my compulsion to define myself as a cripple.

Such is personal revolution, especially as implied by my oft-repeated statement “in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.”

Hence I offer this picture and text in thanks and gratitude to my colleagues in the Living Well seminar, to my comrades in OT, to Fr. Bischel and of course to the Muse herself.

LB/25 October 2011

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