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James O'Brien

We are all related by the blood of the victims




Flew home from New Mexico on Saturday night. We had to change planes in Vegas. Our flight crew was delayed coming in from Milwaukee so we had two extra hours in the Vegas airport. Terri lost a dollar playing slots. I stared at people, many of whom were very overweight and unhealthy looking. Impression: the world is a slob anymore. I was feeling very bloated and uncomfortable and disheveled myself. On the flight, we had “funny” flight attendants, which Southwest apparently encourages, but which can be painful. Some people should never be allowed near a microphone. When we landed in Oakland, just before midnight, the flight attendant said, “Welcome to Oakland. If you live here, welcome home, if you are visiting, (in a stage whisper), lock your doors.” It got a tepid laugh but not from me. It was not what I needed at that moment, not what anybody needed after a long day of travel and it made me sad for Oakland and hostile to the crew and the airline. If we had any leadership in the city I might write someone about it. It reminded me of the problem many Oaklanders avoid, the problem of violence, which the City itself doesn’t quite ignore, but which it treats as a political issue, as opposed to the public heath issue it is.


Certainly there is a general awareness of Oakland’s reputation among outsiders. Despite the City’s occasional Renaissances, which tend to be mostly culinary or cinematic, or which occasionally have to do with real estate development, the enduring impression of outsiders is that this is an unsafe place for anybody, a place of wild west gun violence everywhere, in which the new code of the west does not preclude the killing of women, children and the unarmed. It is a difficult impression to refute, despite the reality that most of the city is safe and much of it is lovely. Within the city, the reputation creates fear and serves to restrict movement. Outside the city, it taints the way others see us, as citizens, and as individuals who agree to live here amidst unlawfulness.


Directly, the violence here disproportionately affects minorities and residents of very particularly, long-neglected, economically-struggling sections of the city. Young black men are most at risk. But when the City in general becomes the butt of flight attendant jokes, we might all want to take a look at ourselves.


In fact, it is possible that, if there is one thing that makes black and white and brown and flatland and hills all one, it is the general reputation of Oakland. If nothing else, we are all related by the blood of our victims. If we manage to remain free of a bullet, if we hire private security guards to prowl our winding streets, and load up our house fronts with cameras and lights, if we manage to remain segregated in the places we call home, if in our daily lives we manage to avoid the more dangerous areas of the city, it is when we leave the boundaries of Oakland that we are united. All our efforts to separate ourselves from the violence and the trauma, from our fellow Oaklanders suffering under the accumulating trauma and the staggering inequity of violence finally fail to distinguish any of us from each other. Should we care what others, what outsiders, think of us, or how we are seen as residents of a dangerous city?  Or should we just simply care that Oaklanders are in pain? Should we worry that the violence and the reputation are the causes of our paralysis as a city, that however much we obsess over potholes, chaotic road diets and amorphous FBI raids, the violence supersedes all other problems, and drains our ability to deal with them. Maybe the problem is that we only think we are functioning in spite of the violence, but actually are blind to the weight we really bear, to how it holds all of us back. For me, the ironic reality check came from outsiders (some of whom may very well be based in Oakland, like insider outsiders), from their view of us. The flight attendant made a bad joke at the expense of many of the exhausted passengers, but she reminded me of something important. Maybe if we stopped for longer, to think, to feel, to be curious about the lives of those we have lost and the plight of those who have lost them, we might come together, we might change things.

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