In part, this was because of September 11 and the political climate on campus in its immediate aftermath, though the October 5th candlelight march was incredible. But a lot of it had to do both with my failure to be an effective organizer and with USAY's own organizational failures. Hours after i'd first gotten involved with what people were then calling the "student union," i sat down with Katie and Stephen and Abi and they told me about all the conflict the student union people had created over the seven or so months they'd been organizing. I got involved because i wanted to fight for real change at Yale, but also on some level because i thought i could act as some sort of bridge, that i could reform USAY from the inside. This was extraordinarily naive and obnoxious of me.
During FOCUS, when some USAY people were putting together flyers for incoming students, one of them asked me to go find another student, who'd been active in agitating for financial aid reform, so that she could be photographed for the flyer and talk about her experience on financial aid. Problem was, i learned, this person wasn't on financial aid, and it seemed odd that such had been the assumption, primarily because the woman in question was African-American. This would foreshadow, for me, larger problems in how USAY interacted with other organizations on campus. I'm tempted to blame F&T for this, though i share culpability in that i was unable to make any real changes, and my organizing conversations were falling apart before my eyes.
By the beginning of November, i felt like my organizing had failed. I don't think i really understood how to do what i wanted to do, how to get my organizing to where i wanted it to be, how to really have an organizing conversation, how to really build power. My organizing "failed" because i didn't understand what i was doing and because i couldn't figure out how to push people, how to help folks move forward. USAY, meanwhile, had seemingly decided to concentrate its organizing efforts on YCC reps, which, i thought, was a complete dead-end and recipe for obsolescence. The cultural houses and the Co-Op were, for the most part, disgusted (though Abbey and a few others were working hard to build a new relationship between student labor folks and the various organizations arising from the cultural centers even then, and later cooperation with the Women's Center PAC was also very fruitful.) My conversations with Alek were mostly shouting matches in various dining halls around campus. (Sorry man.) At the mid-november membership meeting, the organization backed a platform i didn't really get and wasn't particularly excited about. I felt completely useless, so i left, which i should not have done, despite hard pushes from Abbey, who urged me to change things by building committee. She was right of course, but it took me a long time to learn how to do that. (In part, i left because of my attempts to cling to an idealized orthodox anarchism. I also didn't trust several people on the committee - particularly the guy who later went off to work with the CIA.)
I returned to student labor organizing a month and a half later, when Abi and some others tried to restart SLAC as the contract officially expired and the interest-based bargaining process dragged on. I stayed relatively involved in the SLAC stuff, though i disappeared for two weeks because i was mad at Abbey and Abby at one point, and i wasn't involved at all in the "Social Contract" meetings, which i seriously regret. But if i made it to meetings pretty frequently, I didn't really do much for most of the semester, because i was deeply depressed and felt like i had nothing to contribute.
A couple things brought me back - in no particular order these were ongoing informal conversations with Katie, who actually suceeded in getting me back into a USAY meeting, taking Michael Denning's Strikes In Twentieth Century History and Culture graduate seminar with a room full of GESO steering committee members (and the union's current chair,) and watching movies like Salt of The Earth, Norma Rae, Tout Va Bien, and Man of Iron, (you try watching Salt of The Earth and not wanting to organize!) deciding that someone really needed to organize Julie and Zoe, and the GSA Town Hall meeting on unionization, with Anita, Bobby, and Michael Denning speaking in favor of the union and Susan Hockfield, Ian Shapiro, and an anti-union graduate student speaking against. Although Yale did everything they could to limit the amount of people who could be in the room, hundreds of GESO members showed up, including over a hundred who were locked out of the room. The energy inside was powerful, as graduate teachers and researches directly challenged Hockfield to give concrete answers to all the crucial questions to which she artlessly attempted to give insultingly effusive responses.
So i started organizing again, doing massive litdrops to try to get students to the April 24 "Equal Partnership" action, running up and down all the entryways of three colleges and slipping leaflets under every door, though i still wasn't ready to actually have an organizing conversation with someone. April 24th was powerful for many reasons, even if i missed the celebration afterwards because i had to write a paper about fredric jameson. F&T marched in with the drill team and the crowd parted to let them through and K spoke and we owned college street and people looked on and waved from the sidewalk and from The Anchor and from fucking Hot Tomato's and perhaps for the first time, i felt powerful.
I decided that i wanted to work with HERE that summer, and F&T hooked me up with the union's east coast recruiter. Between when i went home and when Connie Holt called me to tell me they had a spot for me with Local 100, a friend from high school and middle school passed away after a long battle with cancer. L's death came as a shock to me and many other friends, because the last we'd heard the cancer was in remission and she was going to be able to go back to school. Instead, three months after her twentieth birthday, we found ourselves at her funeral. L and i were never that close, but she was someone i had a great deal of admiration for, and someone i liked a lot. Every day after school she, with her little brother S, was an integral part of the group of us who'd walk down Manhattan College Parkway, through Brust Park, and down 242nd street to the train station and the bus stop. (This was where we said our goodbyes, since she took the bus to the Bronx neighborhood where her family lived, and i took the 1-9 train the ten miles to the upper west side.) I was devastated. The funeral was more a celebration of who L was than a straightforward outpouring of grief and pathos, though there was a great deal of grief, and the admixture of emotion which hung low in the pentecostal church over our heads was palpable, tangible. But the Mennonite reverend who led the ceremony, and all of L's family members and friends spoke of how L lived her life, and of how she battled against the cancer and found the stregnth to face it. I left the funeral on the subway with a bunch of people from high school i hadn't seen in years. We ate a very somber lunch at the pizzeria on 86th and broadway next to the tasti-d-lite and said our goodbyes. I went home and tried to process what i was feeling - my grief and my rage and my feelings of powerlessness and frustration and loss, and my deep guilt at the fact that i hadn't visited L when she was in the hospital, that I hadn't seen or spoken to her in years.
For a while, i just retreated into Television and the internet and tried not to think, because it was too hard, too sad. But eventually i started to mull over the words that the mennonite reverend had said about Lauren. And i thought about my own life. And i felt like something needed to change.
There was a one-week training in Litchfield Connecticut for all the folks doing HERE internships that year. I had to miss my little bro's high school graduation, but in return i learned how to organize. (Thanks, Steve Matthews.) I learned about the food service industry and how to strategically put pressure on universities. We watched Subtext (my second time) and the Frontier Strike video (we all started crying) and then Andrea and Rev. Lee came and talked to us about the Yale fight, and i got really excited.
Working with Local 100 for the next month, there were moments when i considered not returning to Yale, staying in New York and trying to stay on with the union, as the Secretary Treasurer jokingly told me i should. I ultimately decided that the Yale fight, with emerging revelations of involvement in the sudanese civil war, the firing of John Stepp, and reports of secretaries staging lots of kick ass walk ins on their managers, was too important to walk away from. I'll get back to that in a minute.
While i would later be unable to quantify what working with the local meant to me to Janice and Brian in Boston, i want to take the space to do so here. When i got to Local 100, they were in the prcess of wrapping up a major contract victory against Restaurant Associates, a Compass subsidiary. I didn't get to do much actual organizing - a lot of copying, a lot of logistical work, though i did go on a few house visits, including one where a guy threatened to get "real ignorant" on us and we talked him down and got him to bring a card in to the house for the woman we were trying to see to sign, and a lot of shop visits. What was powerful for me was seeing victory for the first time, was talking to the workers on the Goldman Sachs committee and in the bowels of Rockefeller Center about how they'd won, was seeing a sucessful card check and stealing the cork from the champagne bottle to bring back to New Haven and show everybody that yes, card checks were real and they worked and we were going to have several of them eventually, and we were going to win. I carried the cork in my pocket to the first meetings of what became the undergraduate organizing committee, after i'd decided that i would come back, and i would come back to organize. When i was arrested on September 25, 2002, the cork was with me, as it was on March 6, 2003, when we led a 500 undergrad-strong student walkout in the middle of a snowstorm and created a new vision of undergraduate education together with thousands of workers and members of the New Haven Community.
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