December 27, 2011
Ashland, Ore: where the occupation predates the movement
This artsy and culturally-sophisticated mountain town nestled into the side of the Siskiyou Mountains right on the border between California and Oregon – an area old timers know as the State of Jefferson because it once tried to secede from the union – has long been known for its rich history of social and political activism.
But it’s unlikely to ever be known for its occupation.
At an organizational meeting yesterday afternoon for Occupy Ashland – held at a fast food organic restaurant instead of outside on the Plaza in front of City Hall because, participants told me, it was too cold out there – about 15 people talked about where next to take the 99 percent movement locally.
Occupy Ashland meets at Grilla Bites on the Plaza, far left Suzia Aufderheide.
They discussed taking part in a national day of action on January 20 in nearby Medford by marching to the courthouse and speaking at the town’s annual Martin Luther King Day celebration, which is put on by the city and the local economic engine the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Years ago I was a reporter for the daily newspaper here and my self-defined beat was the activist community. While all my old sources are still here in the Rogue Valley, none of them are really involved with Occupy Ashland. I knew two people at the meeting, and both went, in large part, because I was going to be there.
On Christmas Eve, I couched surfed at the home of Ryan Navickas, a guy I once wrote a story about when he tied himself a good hundred of feet over the Illinois River to prevent a logging truck from getting into the National Forest for a timber sale. He’s been too busy protesting the proposed expansion of the ski resort to attend many Occupy Ashland meetings.
And the past two nights I’ve been staying with Randy Dolinger, the unequivocal mayor of the homeless community here in Ashland, an early and active supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement who has been fighting for the lower income people in the 99 percent for decades. He dropped out of the local movement when it was taken over by college student and upper middle class activists.
“This town has become cluttered like an old maid’s closet with political correctness and washed out wanna-be revolutionaries,” he told me when I asked why he wasn’t helping with the occupation.
Ashland, like Boulder, Colorado, another western capital of liberalism, has become gentrified. And gentrification, Dolinger said, is the enemy of the 99 percent, pointing out that the root of the word is gentry.
Sure, Ashland had a brief occupation when some of the local homeless people set up on the Plaza, the tourist center of town. They were there from Oct. 6 until the police cleared their stuff out on October 29.
But in another way, Ashland has been occupied by the precursor of the 99 percent movement since folks like Dolinger started matriculating here in the early 1970′s. When the Age of Aquarius in San Francisco became saturated, many of the hippies headed north. And more than a few landed in Ashland. (At the first Occupy general assembly meeting I covered I already knew the hand signals from my days of covering direct action in and around Ashland.)
In the years following the leftist influx into Ashland, the winners of the Bay Area real estate boom began to follow the free-love folks for the same reasons they came here: the vibrant and collegial small-town life, the beautiful views and the balmy weather.
There’s been class warfare in Ashland ever since. And the wealthy have been slowly pulling ahead for years now. There are as many Mercedes as magic buses, there’s more perfume and make-up stinking up the aisles of the food co-op than patchouli and dreadlocks. And, in a true sign of the times for Ashland, Geppetto’s, a local breakfast joint started in the 70′s by a couple of San Fran expats has been shuttered.
Randy Dolinger, center, at Evos Coffeeshop in downtown Ashland.
When I was a reporter here, the city took out the street benches, in part, because they had become a place for the vagabonds to congregate. Dolinger, Ryan Navickas and his brother Eric organized a group of activists to construct their own benches right on the Plaza and they set them up right where the city had removed them.
Eric Navickas went to to win a seat on the City Council. But come the next election, members of the Chamber of Commerce and other monied interests in town waged what can only be called a smear campaign against him that cost him his seat in city government.
The Navickas brothers are deplored by those in Ashland who would like to see the community morph into more of a tourist town because of their decade-long fight against the expansion of the Mt. Ashland Ski Area. More ski runs would certainly attract more visitors in the wintertime, when the popular Oregon Shakespeare Festival is on hiatus. But they would also cut into the locally-revered Ashland Watershed, home to both an old growth forest and the city’s source of crystal-clear, fluoride-free drinking water.
Navickas’ electoral defeat and the tepid nature of Occupy Ashland may indicate that the forces of gentrification are winning here.
On the other hand, one side project of Occupy Ashland is to create a “chamber of commons” which those spearheading say may have the power to reverse the current trend of yuppification.
“It would help entrepreneurs establish businesses that would be good for the overall community, rather than good for profits but bad for the watershed,” said Suzia Aufderheide, an Ashland activist of 33 years who has been splitting her energies between Occupy and fighting the ski area expansion.
She said they are working to establish a 501c.6 that would enable it to buy group health insurance
“We all get goosebumps when we get together and talk about this because we all feel that we are at the threshold of a new civilization,” Aufderheide told me. “Soon, the chamber of commerce will be coming to us for help.”
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Hey Bob, you’re in Ashland and did not have an off the record beer?
You continue to write well while continuing to be inaccurate with implications. The Ashland Chamber of Commerce does not support candidates. Members make their own decisions as to who to support. I know of some members who voted for Eric. As to smears, the election was a while ago. I don’t remember hearing anything that wasn’t true about Eric. Of course, I might have missed something without you covering the political beat in our fine town.
Bob, we’re a small, unfunded (no gentry here;-) group, aligned with a global movement. The old timers are thrilled some students have stepped up. We need more $$ and energy from all Ashlanders.
Thanks for your support.
Bob, I believe your sources may have led you atray in a few of your assertions about Occupy Ashland. It was not the homeless who started OA, but the students who you slam as gentrified. Yes, homeless people took advantage of the occupation of the plaza and were the primary night-time occupiers until the police closed down the occupation, but is that so different from many other towns?
I’m sure it’s fun for you to return to your old stomping grounds and bemoan the fact that the folks here are all off base and headed in the wrong direction. How about you move back and get involved with OA and insist that all General Assemblies be held out doors? With your strong voice and good PR skills I’m sure you could convince them to get with the program and remake OA into a red-hot occupy movement.
Good article, Bob. Ashland is easy to love, but not because of the progressive zeal of its inhabitants. More like the gentle somnolence of its acknowledged liberal bias.
Hey Bob,
So as you may expect I have a few reservations in relation to your article. But first I would like to state that OccupyAshland has plenty of unique problems and obstacles it has to overcome. We are a town with a long history of bourgeois activism, a town in which people are more than ready to simply come out to a rally here and there about some pet issue in order to maintain the facade of being socially active and to quell their political conscience. It is difficult to get people to get out of this two bit activist mindset and to begin thinking about pursuing real change again, it is difficult to make Occupy Ashland into something which escapes being “just another activist group” in Ashland. These are battles we are fighting everyday. We have failed to maintain cohesion as much as we could have, we have alienated certain people in spite of our attempts not to, we have often lost focus and organization. We have failed in many ways, but we are still fighting, and we are still making ground even if it is only inches, those are inches which would not have been taken if we had not existed; it is because of these things that I have to bring up a few problems with your article.
One: underhanded jabs, like saying we are not outside because it is too cold are unnecessary and disrespectful. If this sounded like something odd to you, or something that struck you enough to put it into the article you should have asked about it. One of the peculiarities of Ashland is that a large percentage of those in Occupy Ashland are old activists who came to Ashland out of the 60′s and 70′s, not students or youth (unlike it is suggested later in your article). Many of these older activist came forward to say that they were starting to have ill health effects from meeting in the cold for 2 hours or more and would not be able to come to outdoor meetings any more. It was a rough decision to move inside, we knew it would have effects on the people we could reach out to, but after allot of hard discussion we decided it was a necessary move to keep active core members in the group involved. It was a very difficult decision, don’t make light of it.
Also this is not an uncommon change, especially for committees and working groups. You have been to New York so I am sure you have been to the Atrium.
Two: You suggest that we are upper-middle class gentry who are perhaps playing at activism with their free time. I cannot speak for everyone but I can say a few things. I work 30 hours a week night shift as a janitor, spend at least 30 hours a week taking 18 credits at SOU, live with 5 other people in a house so that I can afford to live and spend every other waking moment trying to fight for something better. Evan Lasley who you met at the meeting lives in a one bedroom house with one other person and at times has multiple others living in his front lawn and most nights he gets about 4 trying to further the movement. Raven was on the edge of homelessness when the occupation started, the only things that stopped this was when she got a temp job at harry and davids, though it is up in air whether or not she will be able to retain the job so her future is uncertain; she also puts all of her extra time into fighting for social change. I do not know if there are others in occupy ashland who are “upper middle class” I don’t know about, but these are some I know.
Also, one of the cornerstones of this movements is the breaking down of divisions and labels, to begin to look at each other as human beings again. It seems counter to this to find people who are trying very hard to fight for a better world and then to dismiss or marginalize them by labeling them “upper-middle class” and accuse them of ushering in the victory of gentrification.
Three: The occupation between October 6th and 29th was not started only by “some of the local homeless people”. We decided to prepare for the occupation on September 10th, at a community gathering put on by local activists and citizens. We were initially preparing to make it a solidarity occupation with the October 6th event in DC, we didn’t anticipate the level of response OccupyWallSt would have at that time since it had yet to occur. When the occupation started it was a number of people who took on the hard work of holding the plaza, some homeless, some students, some upper-middle class. I recall two of the most active occupiers where Jason and Vanessa Houk who have two children and sacrificed allot to spend many dark nights on the plaza. We did this together, without labeling and dismissing any because they were homeless or because they were “upper middle class.” We tried our best to unite. Not divide.
Four: I am sorry there were few people you knew at the meeting, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.
Five: We are on the road to becoming the first city in oregon to divest from corporate banks, even though it may be a hard struggle we are on the road. We ran a Move your Money campaign which moved hundreds of accounts out of corporate banks and into local banks. We are moving to be the third city in the nation to pass a resolution against corporate personhood. We are starting a major year long campaign to make sleeping a human right in ashland. Yes, we have failed here and there, we have not done as much as we could, but still we have done allot for being less than 4 month old. I find it interesting that nowhere in your article did you say what we were doing apart from a short sentence on MLK day and never when we talked did you investigate to see what our main campaigns were.
Six: You spent two hours at a committee meeting. We discussed logistics of upcoming actions. And you determined this was enough to cast the judgement that gentrification had won. I would have imagined that if you wanted to have a proper understanding of our occupation you would have at least come to a general assembly.
The final word I would like to say is that there is that I do believe there is a certain breach of respect made here. When you were in Ashland we had good conversations about what we had seen since this movement began, we spoke about how each occupy was running into its own unique set of problems which they would have to face an overcome if they were going to continue. I think a very interesting article could have been written in this vein. Ashland definitely has its unique set of problems which the organizers of occupy ashland are trying to deal with as best as they can. Instead of doing this you dismissed a group of people who are giving up a large portion of their lives to try and further this movement. Instead of trying to find commonality with those you were viewing, instead of seeing them as brother and sisters in the same struggle (in-spite of what flaws they may have had), you decided to label them and defame them. This is sadly disrespectful, because I do believe you are a sincere person.
Fundamentally there is this fact. You did not comment on the tactics we were using, on the nature of our campaigns, on the choice of actions we were pursuing, you did not criticized constructively, you commented on what you thought the people in the room were, you decided to criticize the people around you and this I find difficult to swallow. These are people who spent sleepless nights on the plaza, these are people who spend days in arduous meetings to further human rights, these are people who when given the choice to spend their time blissfully in front of a tv screen instead to choose to spend every extra minute they have fighting for something better. They deserved better.
Sincerely, Emery K. Way
Great piece, Bob! But who wants to hear the truth? You da man, dawg! Can’t wait ’till the book on your travels to all these occupations comes out. If you are upsetting some people you are probably doing your job correctly, thank you and keep up the awesome work!
It’s unfortunate that the only meeting you were able to attend was during Christmas week Bob, as I would have loved to talk to you and shared my own viewpoints about Occupy Ashland.
From what you write, I can guess where most of your sources are coming from and they are inaccurate.
As Emery said, Jason and I were out there for much of those three weeks of 24/7 occupation. We’re neither homeless, nor middle class. With three kids, we struggle to live in Ashland, and we are serious about changing things here. You seem to suggest that we are somehow losing, but I reject that. We may have had a lot to learn, but OA has stuck together and we’re still a strong force. I sincerely believe you are upsetting the wrong people (to borrow from Randy).
Another thing you fail to mention is that we have several OA members who have been (and some are still on the road) traveling to other Occupations around the country.
Hi, Bob, I hope you enjoyed your visit. Hearing various people trying to characterize the Occupy movement in Ashland reminds me of the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, eh? From my perspective, I think there are a lot of us old folks doing our best to nurture and support a budding new generation of activists here. It’s thrilling to see a substantial number of new faces getting involved, many of whom seem to be in it for the long haul. I have been particularly moved by their commitment to a consensus-based decision process marked by inclusion and treating everyone, no matter their socio-economic status, with utmost respect and dignity. To me, this is truly what democracy looks like. Thanks for taking the time to visit and to write about our local affairs. Your love of Ashland and all its residents (with all our warts) is always evident in your writing. Take care!
A strange kind of reporting, Mr. Plain. You blow into Ashland, bemoan the changes that have occurred since you lived there, assume that whatever your few old acquaintances aren’t involved in cannot have much value, then conclude that the change agents you don’t know except for attending one meeting with them are gentrified dilettantes. No wonder professional journalists look askance at free-lance on-line journalism.
I’ve been involved in peace and justice movements since the civil rights days in Louisiana, so I’m in a good position to judge authenticity. Through Peace House, which I now have the honor of chairing (although I live in Phoenix, not Ashland), I have been close to Occupy Ashland since its inception. I have observed the commitment, the skills, and the sacrifices of the people–especially young activists–who initiated and continue to sustain the movement. I admire them and feel indebted to them and am proud to associate myself with them.
You I don’t know. Perhaps the list of your activist bona fides is long and impressive, perhaps not. But this I venture to infer from your piece: that the spirit of the Occupy movement, which is evident in Occupy Ashland, has escaped you. It is a spirit of inclusivity, of equality of respect regardless of socio-economic standing, and of a certain humility before the challenge of creating a culture expressive of our best qualities.
Why not come back to our area on January 5, when the six of us arrested for occupying U.S. Representaive Greg Walden’s office will appear in Medford Municipal Court? Stay for the barbeque fundraiser that evening? Get better acquainted with us. It may change your opinion. If nothing else, you’ll see that we know how to have fun. And as Emma Goldman was wont to say, If I can’t dance at your revolution, I don’t want to join it.
7. You should limit the number of characters for comments
I do believe that Mr. Plain is only trying to show the local activists some light, not write them off. There must be at least a little truth in his thoughts and observations regarding the antiseptic, comfortable approach to global transformation that Ashland seems to embody. Bear in mind that Mr. Plain has spent many weeks travelling to big city occupations, where the rubber does in fact meet the road, and folks actually sacrifice for this burning hope of creating a better world. Thanks again, Bob, for the challenging words.