Motion Study 1 (A Lost Occupation of Oakland)

There are stories that are born to a place and to a time, stories that are unfolded like a great piece of silk over hundreds of years, and there are tales that appear and vanish like flashfloods or lightning storms, here and there over the world, and have no place in time.

Just as happens in the late fall, the quality of light shifted just so, illuminating an implicit death foretold. In this light things were revealed normally left unseen, and even those who could not see this, they felt its glow grace their skin. 

 1946 

The war was only a year gone, but the city had every aspect of its life change, and was suffering for a reason to be. The war had given it a sense of importance and had to some extent eliminated the divisions among its citizens. A generation of people born into poverty had come to find work and in less than a decade could at last feel that weight fall from them, and they at last tasted the luxury of dream.

 Attempts across the nation by leaders to resume life as it had been lived prior to the war were met with resistance. The social fabric had been changed and to deny a right once granted is for a nation to sign its own death sentence.

 The bus was full of veterans of the war, of working women on the way to pick up their children from grandparents, and the faces on the bus reflected just how the city’s population had shifted. The workers and former soldiers were of several ethnic groups and were making small talk in a way that would never have happened years before. Neighbors.

 At the intersection a squadron of police cars escorted two large trucks whose cargo was stock for a luxury store currently suffering a strike staged by the women employees. One young man was just then reading about that strike when he looked up from his paper to see why the bus was not moving. Instinctually placing the image of police over that of the strike, he began shouting out his window at the police and drivers of the truck. Other passengers followed suit, and soon the driver of the bus pulled in front of the convoy and turned off his vehicle.

 The afternoon sun slanted low into the faces of the people as they exited their cars and taxis, glinting light off chrome and glass catching their eyes as they demanded police and drivers to abandon the cargo. With the street now choked with empty cars, the crowd grew as pedestrians joined. Within hours all city transit had come to a halt and a sense of joy played on the faces of thousands. By nightfall all business other than grocery stores, pharmacies and bars were closed, and the bars placed their Jukeboxes on the sidewalks where the overflowing crowds danced in the warm night air.

The next day many woke to hear a radio announcement by their mayor that the previous evening the streets had been emptied as order prevailed. The citizens had found they were being erased. In the few days that followed many took it upon themselves to direct traffic, to help keep shops open where food could be bought and the light feeling continued to give them courage. A large crowd moved to the mayor’s mansion and demanded his resignation.

Noted national intellectuals, and leftist leaders remained distant from this surge of light, fearful of what they could not see, of what did not follow any previous model of movement. It was a new organism. In less than a week they had managed to kill it.