People often ask me, what motivated you to get into this line of work and to be engaged with politics. There’s a lot of different ways I could answer that question.
Growing up in rural-industrial America, my first relationship to anything even remotely political was being a pot advocate. In my late teens, I was arrested for marijuana and spent a night in jail in rural Missouri. I stood before a county judge, telling him why I thought the legalization of marijuana was critical to the nation’s economy and that I wasn’t hurting anyone by smoking pot (Something I still believe.) He laughed, gave me a fine and told me never to come back to his county. Fair enough.
In my early 20s, I accidently went to jail for nearly a week in Seattle during the WTO protests. When I say accidently, I mean, I wasn’t exactly planning on going to jail that week. I’m glad I did. For six days, a colorful group of activists and many others who had intended to get arrested held hour-long long teach-ins in the cellblock on a number of important topics about social justice. Each night when the lights went out, a rabbi told the history and struggle of the Jewish people. It was an important moment in my life. It was during those nights, and listening to the rabbi talk, that I decided to dedicate my life to working towards creating social change.
It took a long time before I actually found my voice. At the time, I didn’t really know how to write or to express myself. I had no education past the 11th grade and my existence up until that point had been spent on drug induced quests, trying to find the meaning of life and working graveyards at convenience stores in cities across the west.
I could have gone in many directions at that time. I questioned my value as a human being. What was I giving, what was I taking? How could just one person make a difference? Like so many young, low-income people, I was mad at the world and mad at the injustices taking place in my community and beyond. I wanted to do something about it, but didn’t exactly know how that might take shape.
At the time, the late '90s, there was a real charge in the air. The anti-globalization movement had wings. The labor movement was growing. The environmental movement was raging, organizations such as Dignity Village and Street Roots were born. Young people across the Northwest were becoming politically engaged and believed together that real change was on the horizon.
Then, like a flash before all of our eyes, those planes plowed into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people. Wars were launched and the rest is history.
We’re lucky enough in Portland to still live in a place where political dialogue, innovation and working to create social change are a fabric in our community. While the anti-globalization movement may have imploded, the idea of working towards creating real, grassroots change still has legs.
More importantly, many of the questions that I believe young people ask themselves, like where is my place in all of this and how do I work to create lasting change in the community, aren’t answered in a vacuum. It takes having life experiences along with many mentors and if you’re lucky enough a support system.
In short, it takes a village.
When social work students ask me for advice about the social service field I often tell them that unless you’re taking an administrative track, want to be a career bureaucrat and/or you have a family to feed, than you’d be better off by starting your own venture or working for a small grassroots organization.
Your friends might think you’re crazy. Your family will most likely question your motives, and may not support you at all. You may make a fool of yourself on more than one occasion and possibly fail. I have many times.
So when people ask me why I got into this line of work or engaged in politics, I realize that they aren’t really asking me, but actually themselves. And since they’re asking the question, deep down they probably already know the answer.
