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First, I wanted to mention that there will be an Alternative Banking meeting on Sunday from 3-5pm at 1401 IAB (14th floor of the International Affairs Building), Columbia University. This is on the corner of Amsterdam and 118th. Please come!

Next I wanted to mention that I’ve been hearing from other occupied cities, namely Occupy Oakland and Occupy LA. I’ve been meeting the most amazing people this way and I’m super grateful for that. I should be talking to Cheryl from Occupy LA later today, and it sound like her posse of occupiers have really been making things happen with something called the “Responsible Banking Measure” recently passed by the LA City Council. Awesome stuff, and I’ll post more as I learn it. My favorite part was the last line of her email, “let’s do this!”

Another inspiring figure is coming from Occupy Oakland, a photographer named Miles Boisen, whose trademark phrase, “struggle and snuggle,” is very close to my heart. He recently met a group of four protesters who were so fascinating that he asked them to tell a bit more about their story. First, here’s their picture:

Next, here’s one of their stories:

Dear Myles,

It was wonderful to meet you at the time and place we did.  I am happy to give you some background information.  Feel free to use it (or not) any way you like.

I was born in San Francisco in 1944, the year that millions of Jews were being slaughtered by Hitlers minions in Europe.  My mother, Hodee Edwards, is Jewish.  My father, Harvey Richards, is of Welsh ancestry.  I witnessed the 1950s in the streets of Oakland, watching my mother crying over the Rosenbergs execution, and experiencing the racism of our world through the eyes of my African American step father (George Edwards) and my sister (Lou Edwards).  I dodged the FBI coming to my house to harrass my family and witnessed doors being slammed in the FBI’s faces as they sought to intimidate dissidents in Oakland.  I traveled to the USSR in the summer of 1961, the year I graduated from high school, to help my father and his wife, my stepmother Alice Richards, make two films on ordinary life in the USSR.  See this for a clip from that movie.

I entered UC Berkeley in the fall of 1961 and immediately joined the civil rights movement.  My first demonstrations were against compulsory ROTC at Berkeley, a struggle that resulted in the cancellation of compulsory ROTC in my sophmore year.  I participated in the sit-ins at Mel’s drive-in restaurants (see this for a clip of my father’s film showing those demos and a shot of me on the picket line), at the Sheraton Palace Hotel (see this which includes a shot of me being dragged out of the lobby by the SFPD) and along auto row on Van Ness in San Francisco in 1963 and 1964 against racial discrimination in hiring, then rampant all around the bay area.  I spent 2 months in the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno in 1966 for my efforts.

I resisted the draft from my graduation in 1966 when I was classified 1A to 1969 when the draft board just gave up on me and never sent me another nasty letter.  See this for a slide show of events that took place on the day I was drafted (but slipped out of their grasp), Oct 18,1967 during the Stop the Draft Week events on the very same street  Occupy Oakland’s general strikers walked down last Tuesday.

As you can see the events of those years are still very alive for me through the work I have done archiving my father’s film collection (see this).  I have kept the memories of those movements alive because I believe in them now as I did then.  So, for me, the Occupy Oakland movement is a dream come true.  It finally gives voice to the cry for justice and sanity that has been silenced for so long under the hegemony of the Republican and Democratic Parties ever since the election of the crook, Richard Nixon, and continuing until the present day with the election of the most recent fraud, Obama the bomber.

I rejoice at the outpouring of outrage from our youth.  They have made it possible for me to switch from the tiny minority who over the past 40 years have dissented against the American empire, to the 99% who are dissenting today.  What a relief.  I don’t know where this movement is headed nor how long it will last.  But I do know that it has my whole hearted support and that it opens the door to ten thousand possibilities.  I am in awe that I lived to witness it.  Since I am retired now, my future plans are to continue to manage Estuary Press and the Harvey Richards Media Archive and to make sure that we do not forget our history, even as we are making it right now.

I guess you can’t call this brief, but I tried my best.

Thanks for asking, and hoping you don’t regret it,

Paul Richards