[sudo-discuss] Incident Saturday

[Yardena Cohen]

Sorry for being slow in documenting this, but the community deserves
to know that this happened.

Sometime on Friday night, the men's bathroom was vandalized. I feel
confident that it was an art-murmur walk-in, but there is no way to
know for sure. They spread human feces along the walls creating what
appeared to be two swastika shapes - not entirely faithful renditions
but enough to reasonably perceive swastikas in them.

I learned of this when I came to set up my TIL Saturday around noon.
Our landlord George showed it to me. He was understandably upset, both
about having to clean up the mess and also about the symbolism. His
father is Jewish. He wondered if he had been targeted. I also was not
happy, as a queer Jew with many family members in Yad Vashem.

Unfortunately, this caused him to descend into another tirade in which
nobody was spared. He assumed right away it was done by a Sudoroom
member. There was a clear path of association that went: Sudoroom ->
anarchists -> Nazis. At one point he even suggested that a kid from
Sudo Kids had "come back to finish the job". But mostly he accused
Sudo members. Since I was representing Sudoroom in this conversation,
he ended up addressing me over and over as if I was personally
responsible for this swastika, as if I had done it myself. I actually
found this to be the most traumatic part of the whole event. Not even
offensive, just downright traumatic.

There was the usual fare of yelling about money and society and his
inability to find good tenants. He twice informed me that he was
evicting both Sudoroom and the Public School and that Laurie would
prepare a 30 days notice. He's said that before. He told me that
Sudoroom and Public School should close their doors for the rest of
the day, because "If I see any of them, I will beat them up!" I told
him I'm sorry, but I have a Linux class scheduled for 2:00, please
don't beat them up. That calmed him down a little. In short, the rant
was a mix of old and new.

Except this time Laurie was there. Laurie is our other landlord - she
is George's wife and they own the building equally. The way he talked
to her during this rant was very revealing, because she also became a
target. He yelled at her for not having a 30-days notice already
prepared, for having written the craigslist ads that attracted
Sudoroom and Public School (and, incidentally, many of his other
tenants). He said quite hurtful things to her, including that she was
nothing but a drain on his life and that he wanted a divorce from her.

She just stood there quietly saying nothing, holding their dog on a
leash, looking at me with eyes that said "I'm sorry you have to see
this." After a while, when George left the room, she apologized to me.
She said "please don't listen to anything he said, he just gets that
way when his buttons are pushed."

They ended up not leaving for a couple hours. Initially George refused
to clean the bathroom or let anybody else clean it because he wanted
to show evidence to the cops, who he believed would show up to
investigate. It took a chorus of Laurie and several of his other
tenants to convince him that OPD doesn't show up for things like this,
the cops aren't coming, the bathroom smells, please let's just clean
it up. Eventually he lost steam and they left.

I'm not really sure how to wrap up this email. Writing it was
difficult. You will have to draw your own conclusions.