[sudo-discuss] Incident Saturday

[Gregg Horton]

Can we PLEASE have a sudo taskforce that is on-going that attempts to
look for a next space? I would gladly participate, i'm really sick of
reading about such abusive behavior. The space is FAR from an ideal
space, and having an ongoing search would make incidents like these seem
less dire.

On 9/9/13 2:52 PM, Yardena Cohen wrote:
> 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.
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