“It is the very nature of the state that is putrid”
It falls apart, we all got work to do
At the Worcester DSA-led Gaza protest on Saturday I met a guy named Neil who told me he’s a big fan of this newsletter. Has a paragraph from an old post printed out, he told me. Would go back to it, read it often. Something about a subconscious pilot light, he said. I told him I straight up couldn't remember. But he said it meant a lot to him and that’s nice to hear. I made a note of it, then back at my desk later that night searched the newsletter for the term. I found the passage and read it over. The funny thing about reading work from a couple years ago is you know it’s you writing it but it feels like someone else. (In a way, it is.)
Here’s the passage. It’s from May, 2022, in a piece headlined “The world’s a bully and hope is the lunch money,” about the pointlessness of investing yourself in city politics after the child massacre in Uvalde, Texas. It’s uhhhhh relevant.
The futility of it all has been making an especially strong case of late. The evidence is bountiful. The logic is sound. To abandon hope and tune out may very well be the correct decision and I wouldn’t blame anyone for making it. But if I made that decision, if I surrendered the belief that a better world was possible, I know I wouldn’t make it very long. So I’m in a bind here. If you’re reading this, it’s possible you are too. If survival depends on a horizon in the imagination, it’s a matter of self preservation to maintain it, regardless of what the body of evidence suggests. And the funny thing about hope is it’s always technically there, like there’s some sort of subconscious pilot light situation happening in just about everyone, I imagine, but if you want to actually feel it, you gotta put the work in. I guess if anything that’s what I’m really doing here: working to keep hope alive with silly little words on this silly little subject matter and believing if I do a good enough job the effort might rub off on someone. No one reading this has the power to solve this country’s myriad problems, but everyone reading this has the power to make Worcester a better place. The city might be the last center of power in our society over which regular people have any real agency. So as it looks more and more like the horizon in America is artificial, it’s real here in Worcester.
Turns out I needed to hear from that past version of me, as much as Neil did when he printed it out. If you wanna actually feel hope you do have to put the work in. The silly tasks you do to give that subconscious pilot light some gas are at once mundane and of existential importance.
I told Katie the story about Neil and read her the passage and she said “well, it rubbed off on someone!” I went huh that’s a good point actually. Hadn’t considered it for even a second. I put the work in, back in May, 2022, and it objectively did make a difference for at least one person. No small feat. It’s funny—even with the evidence right in front of me, it still didn’t register that my writing could mean something to someone else.
Thank you, Neil, if you’re reading this! You have thrown me headlong into a surreal and edifying headtrip.
The goal then is the goal now: use the craft of writing to keep my own hope alive and, in turn, hope it rubs off on people. In other words: It falls apart, we all got work to do / It gets dark, we all got work to do.
Please help keep this outlet alive and growing if you can. I don’t take it lightly that my paid subscribers allow me to do this full time. Hope it shows.
Today’s post details an interesting walk around city hall. Then a few other things.
A walk around city hall—upcoming film screening on WooFridges—an addiction resource guide—odds and ends
It is the very nature of the state
I went down to city hall Saturday to catch a few things—the aforementioned Palestine protest held by the Worcester chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America at noon, and then at 1 p.m. the newly re-formed Worcester Food Not Bombs’ first ‘cook.’
I arrived with the intention of producing a somewhat puffy follow-up to the Thursday post (“We need to start at the definition of “politics”), and my plea within that people think about politics differently and get involved locally. ‘Here’s an example of what that looks like,’ basically.
I left having watched a half dozen cops arrest an unhoused man for the crime of back talk then toss him in a paddy-wagon for a long weekend in jail. So the piece took on a different tenor. But we’ll get there. This story’s best told chronologically.
Palestine protest
When I first got down to city hall, walking from my parked car on Portland Street to the front of the building, I noticed a cruiser parked by the common oval in a park that was otherwise strikingly empty. I snapped a pic, filed it in the back of my brain, and headed over to the protest out front.
About 40 people were there when I arrived, some wearing keffiyehs, others holding signs in support of Palestine. Neil, mentioned at the top of the post, held a large canvas with a spray paint stencil of Palestinian legend Refaat Alareer’s last poem, “If I must die,” published shortly before the IDF killed him in a targeted air strike last December.
After a round of chants, Jake Scarponi of the DSA shouted into a megaphone about the failings of the Democratic Party.
“In a race where, compared to 2020, both major parties lost votes, the Democrats simply lost far, far more. Why? Because Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party offered worse than nothing to the people of this country,” said Scarponi. The comment was met with a chorus of “Shame!” from the crowd.
Harris promised to do “not a thing different” from Biden, save for staffing her cabinet with more Republicans, he said. Kids still in cages, four more years of deportations, record-high police funding and also killing. Queer people thrown under the bus. Oil and gas produced at unprecedented levels. Worst of all, Scarponi said: “…perhaps the most depraved, the most vile, the most reprehensible and disgusting platform plank of all: full-throated backing of vicious, bloody genocide and the Zionist apartheid regime.”
Amen to all that.
Scarponi was one of several speakers in the hour or so I stuck around. The last speaker I caught read a quote from Fidel Castro, a staunch supporter of the Palestinians in his time.
“With all our heart we repudiate with all our strength the unrelenting persecution and genocide that Nazism unleashed in its time against the Jewish people. I cannot recall anything so similar in contemporary history as the eviction, persecution and genocide carried out today by imperialism and Zionism against the Palestinian people. Stripped of their land, expelled from their homes. Dispersed throughout the world. Persecuted and murdered. The heroic Palestinians are an impressive example of abnegation and patriotism. And are living symbols of the greatest crime of our age.”
It was something Castro said at the UN General Assembly in October, 1979. That’s 44 years before Oct. 7, the event we’re made to believe was the “start of the conflict.” How much atrocity is bound up with that insidious phrase? How much death and destruction in the name of it, the revenge it implies? “The start of the conflict” and “I’m speaking”—two phrases in stiff competition for the inevitable headstone of the Democratic Party.
That’s the thought I chewed on as I moved from the Gaza demonstration to the Food Not Bombs event behind city hall.
(To get involved with Worcester DSA, there’s a signup form on the website.)
Food Not Bombs
Heading to the back of city hall, I noticed the cruiser from earlier had moved to the other side of the oval. A DPW worker was instructing the dozen or so folks from the new Food Not Bombs chapter that they couldn’t set up on the common—someone later told me he cited liability reasons—and that they’d have to move outside wrought iron fencing, onto the sidewalk on Front Street. As I approached, the organizers were carefully lifting a folding table with a crock-pot of lentils on top, shuffling it outside the city common.
Once they were set, I noticed the cops had gotten out of their car and were now talking to a group of people sitting on the big weird concrete steps between city hall and the oval.
Two of those people, a man and a woman, walked away, visibly frustrated. “This is harassment,” the woman said, near tears. “Where are we supposed to go?”
I asked for an interview and turned my recorder on. I asked what the cops said to them, exactly. “They’re throwing everyone out of the park,” said Dennis, the man.
“It doesn’t matter where you are, they just make you leave,” said the woman, Angie.
“They tell us to leave. We’re not doing anything.”
How long have they been doing that? “For the past few months, it’s been really bad,” Angie said. “It’s awful.” Sit there for maybe an hour, she said, and the cops will come up to you and tell you to get going.
“We got nowhere to go,” said Dennis. “Say we go to the (WRTA) Hub, we get thrown out of there. You can’t sit there. We can’t go to the library anymore. We got nowhere to go, and yet they wanna close down the shelters.”
So is there a place you can go? “Nowhere,” said Dennis. “Only way we can go anywhere is somewhere we can hide and not get arrested.”
I thanked them for their time and told them I write for an outlet called Worcester Sucks. Angie laughed and said “Love it. Love it. I fuckin’ love it.” Dennis said “make sure you get all that in there.” (Put a pin in that thought.) The two of them took their lunch, courtesy Food Not Bombs, and walked across the street.
I turned back to the Food Not Bombs organizers. One of them, Lyndsay Jane, told me they’ve been working to get a local chapter running for the past few months. There was another one years ago, but it faded away for reasons unknown. “We just wanted to get it started up again,” she said. Their first cook, the menu was stewed lentils and bread. As we spoke, other organizers ladled it out for passersby. The idea is simple: serve food to anyone who wants it—a straightforward exercise in mutual aid. I had a bowl and it was good stuff. It was served with a side of two pamphlets, “To Be Ungovernable: On the history and power of Black anarchism” and “Words Mean Things” about the concept of mutual aid. Both are on my desk now, awaiting a read. I’m looking at the first page of “To Be Ungovernable” right now and at the bottom there’s a pull quote: “Anarchists believe that we can’t just replace existing governments with radical ones, as it is the very nature of the state that is putrid.”
They plan to hold bi-weekly cooks and benefit shows. To learn more or get involved, check their Instagram page.
I asked Jane about what the current moment calls for from the community.
“Really, we’re beyond the point of preventing fascism from taking over,” she said. “At this point we just have to work outside of it, you know what I mean? At this point all you can do is organize with your friends and try to work outside the system.”
After we spoke, I noticed the cops were still there in the park, back in their cruiser now. Remembering my conversation with Angie and Dennis, I took a walk around the common to talk to some people.
A walk around the common
I interviewed a woman sitting on a bench by herself, near the entrance closest to the old CVS. In front of her was a neatly bundled shopping cart filled with belongings and covered by a tarp. Her name’s Nicole.
She said that the emergency shelter at the old RMV has a delayed opening. She plans to go there once she can, but until then, there’s nowhere else. It was supposed to open on the 15th, now it’s the 18th, she said. All afternoon a stiff wind was cutting through what I thought was adequate attire. Just holding my notebook and recorder made my hands freeze up, and I had to change the recorder’s batteries at one point, drained quickly by the cold. Nicole looked freezing, clutching herself. I thought about how the 18th was still nine days away. I asked her what the plan was for the meantime.
“Just gotta stick it out. Stay outside. Try to be safe and have respect for where you are and just wait it out.”
A common refrain among the unhoused people I’ve interviewed over the years, Nicole simply refuses to go to the Queen Street homeless shelter. Sleeping outside is a better alternative, even on frigid November nights.
Yeah I don’t go there. To me, they just don't treat their clients good. Some of the staff members they have, they come in with attitudes. If someone’s doing something bad to you and you’re defending yourself, you'll get kicked out. Even if you tell them what happened, they’ll kick both people out. It shouldn't be like that, you know what I’m saying? It’s the person [who] causes the problem that should be the one kicked out, not the person defending themselves.
If the staff got issues at home, don't bring it to work. Don't take it out on the clients. ‘Cause we already got mental issues and you making it worse, you know what I’m saying?
I asked her about people getting kicked out of the common by the cops. She said they’ve been telling people, herself included, that you can’t have shopping carts in there, can’t smoke. Do either and they’ll kick you out. That happened to Nicole the day prior, she said.
I had—everybody had it here all day a couple days ago and nobody said anything—later on that night maybe around 5 or 6, there was a cop who came up to me, said you’re not supposed to have shopping cart in here. I said you guys have been here all day and you seen everybody, they have their shopping cart and they didn't remove them. So why all a sudden you tellin’ me I gotta move it? Why are you guys just now saying something about we gotta take our shopping carts out? He said because they was trying to be nice.
Real fuckin’ nice, I said.
I thanked her for her time and moved on. Three other people, all less receptive to a full interview, confirmed what Nicole told me about the smoking and the shopping carts. All of them said the past week has been particularly bad.
I was up on the patio behind city hall, about to ask a fourth person for an interview, when I heard shouting down by the oval.
I turned around to see that Dennis, from earlier, was getting arrested. The two cops in the cruiser all afternoon now had Dennis pressed against the boards of the ice rink, pulling his hands behind his back to cuff them.
I watched from the patio as Dennis protested: “I didn’t fuckin’ do anything, why are you arresting me?”
“Drop the bag” said one of the cops as he grabbed Dennis’ elbow. He screamed in pain. “Watch my fuckin’ elbow, dude. I got hit with a bat yesterday.”
The other cop said “Stop resisting.” The cop that first grabbed his elbow grabbed it again. Dennis got agitated. “Do it again. Do it again. Dude, you squeeze my fuckin’ elbow again.”
The cop that had been squeezing his elbow said, “You were yelling at us in our cruiser about making $60 bucks an hour to sit here and not do our job.”
That’s grounds for arrest, I guess.
“Yeah I said that you make $60 an hour,” Dennis said. “Who gives a fuck?”
The cop: “I explained to you why we’re here. We’re not here about them at all.”
Regardless of why he was there, he had an unhoused person in cuffs while saying it.
“Yeah, but you threw them out of the park. People are allowed to be in the park, bro. You guys have been throwing us out of here for three fuckin’ days.”
They left his bag right where he dropped it, and his backpack on the concrete steps. Dennis shouted over his shoulder, “Grab my fuckin’ bag before it gets stolen.” One of the cops said “Relax.” The cops walked him to the Front Street park entrance, right next to where they’d previously made Food Not Bombs relocate. Two more cruisers and a wagon quickly arrived.
“You get in the back of that wagon,” one of the cops said. “If you don’t, I’m going to pick you up and put you in there.”
As they loaded him into the back of the van, Dennis again complained about his elbow. “Well, stop moving around then,” one cop said, apparently unaware of his role in the situation having much to do with moving Dennis around. The van driver took what looked like a phone charger off Dennis and put it in an evidence bag, carrying it with him to the front seat.
I watched this play out from a few feet away. Beside me was the guy I was about to interview when the cops initiated their arrest of Dennis. “And this is what they do,” he said to me. “All day every day.”
Driving back home, GBH was on the radio. It was the new This American Life. A man was candidly relaying to the show producer Trump’s immigration plans. He said there will be workplace raids within the first three weeks. “Those aren’t hard to execute,” he said. The first targets will likely be Guatemalans and Haitians. Tent cities will be constructed to house deportees, or else they’ll be put in jails. I thought about Dennis getting thrown in the back of the wagon. “That’s a long weekend, bro” another unhoused man yelled out. Courts are closed today for the holiday. For certain people, getting frustrated about the cops kicking you out of a park, mouthing off, is enough to get you arrested. I thought about that, and about the fascism the Harris campaign promised should her opponent win. How it was here already. How it has been for quite a while.
“Kamala Harris in her concession speech did not just concede the election. She also admitted that she doesn’t really believe Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’” wrote Ken Klippenstein in a recent piece titled “Biden, Harris Welcome 'Fascist' Trump”.
The “fascism” in the spectacle disappears when it loses political convenience. The fascism in real life hums ever along in the background, undisturbed.
This morning, I read a story in the Telegram warning that mass deportations could destabilize the local economy. Chamber of Commerce President Tim Murray, a Good Democrat, is quoted saying the solution is to strengthen the border. “We have to find pathways for them to become legal and focus on securing our border so people are coming here the right way,” he said. He didn’t say we need to challenge the Trump administration, try to block the raids, try to stick up for our neighbors and the local economy they carry on their backs and drive with their hands and feet. He said we need a stronger border.
And now I’m looking again at the pamphlet on my desk. The words staring back at me: It is the very nature of the state that is putrid.
Help Worcester Sucks grow!
Community-focused and independent journalism is more important than it ever has been. A paid subscription to Worcester Sucks is a cheap and easy way to invest directly in the maintenance and growth of one such outlet—doing work no other outlet will do in this city.
For instance I can guarantee the above story is the only story on three things: Dennis’ arrest, the first Food Not Bombs cook, and the Palestine demonstration.
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The more financial support we have, the more work we can afford to do. We’re already running four distinct columns on a shoestring (~$50,000) budget. For instance, I’ll be posting Aislinn’s school committee preview to WPS In Brief later today.
If we get that up to $100,000 somehow, I’m looking at a second full time employee, and then it’s off to the races.
More than a fridge!
Mark your calendars for Wednesday November 20th, 6 p.m.! There’s a screening for a documentary about the Worcester Community Fridges that local filmmaker Alex O’Neil has been working hard on for the past couple months. It takes place at the White Room (138 Green Street) a fantastic venue run by great people.
I was interviewed for it way back in I wanna say July? Alex asked me to present my overall assessment of the relationship between community groups like WooFridges and city hall and I remember being in a pissy mood to begin with and wasn’t very nice about it. Needless to say—excited to see the final cut. I’m going into the event cold by the way (no advance viewing) so that will be fun.
A callout for addiction wisdom!
Here’s a note from a reader, Willa Odefey, a young journalist at City University of New York with a newsletter on sobriety called Been An Ok Boy.
Hello fellow readers!
I’m Willa, a student of journalism at CUNY and former resident of Main South. As a young recovering addict I have felt firsthand the lack of empathy towards the addiction/recovery community, perpetuated by a general inadequacy in media coverage and (thus) public understanding of addiction as a mental and societal struggle. My work is centered around filling this gap, providing the community with the news and resources it needs while hopefully raising awareness of the humanity of people experiencing addiction and its corresponding situations.
As the holidays approach I’m putting together a resource guide to help addicts and their families/loved ones navigate the season. If you would like to contribute, please fill out this callout form! Resources can be anything from self care methods to meetings etc etc.
I’ll be publishing the finished guide on my substack (Been an Ok Boy), sending it to any responders who provide their email, and potentially distributing print copies (in pamphlet form) in NYC and Worcester.
Thank you!
Please consider helping her out!
Once she has it done, she’ll be sending the guide out to respondents, putting it on her newsletter, and possibly some pamphleting in NYC and Worcester. I’ll share it here too! This is a good exercise in gathering and distilling some likely hard-earned wisdom from our neighbors to put it in front of neighbors that might be needing it. Excited to see the finished product.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading! One more pitch for support real quick. Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Order some merch!
Speaking of needing support, homeless advocacy organization S.O.S. Worcester is looking for donations to help supply unhoused folks with new tents and other gear.
For my email reading list folks, here’s an update from the list of community orgs I posted Thursday.
Update (Friday, 11 am): Here are some orgs I initially missed that readers shared
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Worcester (FYI: They’re holding a virtual meeting on Monday 11/11 6:30 p.m. to process election results and build community)
Worcester Food Not Bombs (new!)
Also, new page to follow: Worcester For Palestine (a children’s day of action event taking place this afternoon).
If you’re interested in actual campus repression of free speech, not the fake Bari Weiss variety, See You Students for Justice in Palestine at Clark is sounding the alarm about some suppressive changes to the student code of conduct.
Miles Howard had a good piece for WBUR about the need for local organizing.
It might seem counterintuitive, to devote more focus to our local leaders and surroundings as the horizon burns. But localized political action yields the most visible changes in our day-to-day lives, for better or worse. Using our voices and our bodies to help shield Massachusetts residents from the worst of Trump, Vance and company will prevent deaths. It will also force us to reckon with some of the most chronic and neglected vulnerabilities of Massachusetts, like our affordable housing shortage, which undermines our conception of the state as this liberal bubble in an increasingly red tide.
The upside down flag “controversy” at Burncoat is 100 percent promulgated by people who 100 percent flew a flag upside down after Biden won in 2020. That’s all I have to say about that.
Near and dear to my heart: Cordella’s Coffee won the Central Mass. Community Choice Award for best local coffee shop. They deserve it!
Something we should look into for Worcester maybe? “Wellesley battery expected to save town residents $8m over 20 years”
And of course we have a council meeting tomorrow. Agenda’s light, but as always the WCT3k crew will be streaming it on Twitch.
Lastly here’s a belief I hold in my heart to be true:
Ok talk to you Thursday!
Interesting on the battery front. One of those facilities is going up in Medway right now,though it's not being advertised specifically as saving the town money. It's in conjunction with an eversource plant in town and is intended to smooth over peak demand.
https://www.townofmedway.org/planning-economic-development-board/pages/battery-energy-storage-systems-bess