[sudo-discuss] Incident Saturday

[Hol Gaskill]

reluctantly ++


Sep 9, 2013 02:58:42 PM, greggahorton at gmail.com wrote:
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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>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>
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