“at a distant remove”
Boulder residents know what “distant remove” feels like. Indeed, many people like living here precisely because it is so removed and remote, distant from the “real world.”
Many rely on online shopping; hence, the discord created by the spate of “lost” UPS deliveries. We’re two hours from participating in county meetings. We’re over four hours from participating in state legislative hearings. Despite technology and the internet, our “representative” bodies of government continue to resist streaming video or recorded public meetings, even teleconferencing.
We Boulderites tend to be socially conscious, contributing to good causes online and otherwise. Those of us who can afford to be generous are. Even those who seemingly can’t afford it do a surprising amount with what they have.
Still, it is the rare individual who steps out and puts his or her hands on people in troubled areas.
Some of those people live here, and their literal reach is global. Most recently, there are the six or seven Boulder/Escalante individuals (that I’m aware of) who traveled to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in early December to stand with the water protectors opposing DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline).
Carla Saccomano was one of these. She and I talked last week about some of her impressions from the trip.
Carla is a relative newcomer to Boulder, most recently having served as a senior assistant to a Chicago alderman. She’s adept within any business/administrative environment, she bakes extraordinary pastries, she works with the local restaurants, she’s one of the newest members of the Boulder Town Planning Commission.
Carla is also one of those people who isn’t content sitting back and letting someone else do it, not when she sees the need and has the capacity to participate.
She and her traveling companions—the whole saga of which deserves its own complete story— arrived at the main Oceti Sakowin Camp at 2a.m. on Dec 4. Through sure happenstance, they ended up parked adjacent to a battered, old mobile home belonging to a combat medic, Vietnam vet, named B.A. He’d driven up from Arizona at the behest of his lawyer daughter who told him he needed to be there. Carla ended up working with B.A., whose mobile home was kept running 24/7 to serve as a warming house for the medic vets, a safe place for stress venting, a source for warming cups of coffee. She said there was tremendous stress on the medics who were patrolling the camp to make sure people didn’t die of hypothermia. While the majority of volunteers arrived self-sufficient and reasonably knowledgeable about Dakota weather realities, there were also those woefully unprepared individuals whose hearts were there, but had maybe left their heads back home.
Later on that Sunday came the announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers was putting a hold on continued construction while they reevaluated legal and environmental issues. This announcement came exactly one day prior to the anticipated “mandatory evacuation” order by which North Dakota law enforcement was going to forcibly remove people from the camp. It was that eventuality which was the reason for several hundred Armed Forces veterans to show up as protectors of the water protectors. According to Carla, all the vet medics fully expected blood to be shed, despite the fact that weapons were expressly forbidden within the camp. (No alcohol, no drugs, no weapons is their continuing policy.) The Army Corps announcement derailed that likely encounter, at least for the time being, and was initially met with exuberance in the camp, albeit tempered with knowing this wasn’t a conclusion.
Carla and companions returned home a few days later. Sadly, upon arriving home, Carla found out that her workmate and camp mentor, B.A., had just died of a heart attack. She immediately headed back to attend his funeral, continues to maintain ties with the people she met there, and imagines returning at some point.
As Carla went on to explain her motivations, “You’ve got this layer up here—the mega corporations and vast moneyed interests— below it, is all the rest of us who don’t benefit from what’s happening at the top; we’re just trying to make our livings. We always had our differences. But now we’ve really fractured. They’ve managed to really fracture us. We all look at the same thing through these different, broken windows. We have to travel toward ourselves to really see what’s there. That’s what compelled me to go to Standing Rock. I don’t want someone else’s interpretation. I need to hear what you are saying. I need to see what you’re trying to show me. Now it’s about how you carry that forward. We need to find a way back to each other again, to talk to each other again, and not get sidetracked from the distractions they’ll keep throwing in our way.”
She continued, “The call that went out was just to show up. In other grave humanitarian situations, you interface with a website and make your tax deductible donation. We’re been trained that way. You’re kept at a remove from the event, no matter how much you feel like really helping out. It separates us from our humanity. They said “come stand with us” They didn’t say come if you’re a medical person, or can donate your truck or whatever. It was “stand with us.”
Of course, not everyone is in a situation take off several days, weeks, travel to distant places. But can’t “showing up” happen locally, at a town meeting? Can’t “standing with us” include standing up for common rights, even within our own communities?
Mantra for the new year: SHOW UP. STAND UP. BE PRESENT. We will live in what we make, or else we will live in what we allow to be made for us.
—Published in the Wayne and Garfield County Insider, December 29, 2016