Street Spirit November 2005

It Takes a Community to Rebuild A Box

by "Perfesser" Mark Creek-Water

I'm sitting here at a meeting in Berkeley's world-famous People's Park. The acting mayor of Berkeley is here, sitting in a circle with about 20 other folks. Already this meeting is boring me. The meeting is about rebuilding the free-clothing box, a long-term People's Park tradition until somebody burned it down many months ago. And then somebody burned the new free-clothing box which folks built to replace the old one....

Already, we've talked about several ideas, such as: contacting the media about this issue; requesting or demanding that University of California administrators meet with us about this issue of the destruction of useable clothing; building a coalition to include students and nearby residents around this issue; and so on.

I'm trying to reckon: What can I do to make an impact? How about this: Just today, I got a nice pair of shoes and a nice T-shirt from the temporary free-clothing box which we set up today. Plus, two of the first few speakers at this meeting -- People's Park "regulars," and perhaps homeless and/or houseless -- said that they got all the clothing which they were wearing "from the free box." They said: "We don't want no more food -- we got enough food. We want our free box back."

In fact, some folks already started rebuilding the free box, approximately two week before this meeting. And guess what? Evidently, under cover of darkness, some University of California security people removed the work which had been done to rebuild the free-clothing box.
So it looks like a clear case of good guys against bad guys. The bad guys are the UC administrators who evidently ordered the partially rebuilt free-clothing box to be removed about two weeks ago. The good guys are us -- those of us who want to rebuild the free-clothing box.

This is how I feel about this issue. How do you feel?

Mark Creek-Water can be reached at Creekwater1948@yahoo.com.

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