The War We Cannot Afford to Lose

 

A Battle Is Not A War

Why didn’t I fight harder to prevent the City from defunding the TBA? Simply, because our CDBG job was done, while the on-going Self Help Housing Project would continue without Government funding. The TBA owned everything that was needed. I didn’t need to get paid. Something the City could not understand. They thought that without pay I would fade away. I missed having a secretary, nothing else. We did lose the funding a little too soon, but that was irrelevant.

The important things was not how many and how much. The real purpose of the TBA was to level the playing field by raising the ability and desire of residents in the Barrio to take proper care of themselves. After that, government money would be poisonous. Even if most newcomers to the Barrio were self-sufficient, and by choice they could have bought elsewhere. It is common sense that a person who recently bought property in the Barrio would look for all available means to enhance their purchase. Those that qualified received assistance. Loans and grants from the TBA were based on low income and need, not length of residency, while by intent employment in the rehab crew was based on residency.

Even millionaires like perks, more so families at the edge of homelessness. Our efforts would keep them from falling off the edge and bring them back to normal. Don’t get me wrong; the ten newcomers who went against the TBA were only a small fraction of newcomers. The rest were decent, and some excellent people. We cared mostly for the spirit, the independence, and the education to gain a foothold on support mechanisms right for the Barrio. We wanted every culture, race, age, or income level, in the Neighborhood to benefit from this support. Still, some discontent and resentment existed. The one example of a family who qualified, and could have gone a lot further, was the Juanito couple, but after getting their fair share, they damaged themselves by trying to grab, grab, grab. If people who use their energy and creativity for crime were to use it for decent outcomes, they would probably end up much further. Juanito is another perfect example that idealistic socialism and globalization will never work, there are always people ready to screw things and others up.

If I did anything of value while I was there, it was to share power. I had no personal financial power whatsoever, but some intellectual, educational, visual, and ethical power. I also had the capacity to affect change, tenacity, and the power to confront evil. It cost me nothing to share it. My choice. Others can do it too.

 

The War Out There

The TBA, not me, also had an impact on related community activities, shifting the role of peer pressure in education, spirituality, the emotional approach to hardships, skill training, family unity, recognition of the value of history, bringing the youth back to their neighborhood of origin, and back to their roots, cooperating with other neighborhoods, and in pride of ownership.

We tapped into the four basic elements of human nature: Mental, Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional, and we did it positively and to unify, using the three environmental basics to pull the Neighborhood up; Pride, Family, Hands, and the peer support of repeated successes carried them forward, always looking to expand their field of expertise in law, economics, and technology. The pride in the grandparent’s eyes seeing their grandchildren and kinfolks returning to the Barrio with a positive and hardworking attitude to renovate their dilapidating homes, was worth every blow, threat, insult, or self-doubt any one of us may have incurred along the way. 

The CDBG Funding had served its purpose as a catalytic booster by using economics, law, and technology effectively. To continue with federal funding, easy money, could easily have led to dependency and a corruption of all the principles we believed in. I let myself relax, take a deep breath, take another sip of expresso coffee, and recharge my batteries for an ongoing battle. Then I compared what I was now seeing taking place in this Barrio against the opposing philosophy of electing a government that will take care of your needs by taxing more out of everyone, and then using that money for a fuzzy “social justice cover-up” full of inequities! Had the City not defunded us, we would have withdrawn our request for funds within a year anyway. At least, while I was involved with the TBA. To continue would have created resentment. There is the proper moment to stop, but we should have had a well thought-out finalization strategy, and we were deprived of that, thanks to a misguided bureaucratic mentality, a very faulty political ideology, and the enemy from within.

There is such a thing as leveraging money, and there is nothing wrong with that when properly and ethically done. You look under every stone to see how to finance creative plans, that is resourcefulness entrepreneurship, and if one fails, you try again using another approach. Here is one example in going to the next level without government funding. I had developed preliminary plans for the restoration of the 60 units in the abandoned adobe project on 17th and Convent. My plan was to have it done by the rehab crew, with a construction loan, eliminate the ten worst units to create pleasant visual openings in the doughnut. Using 50% sweat equity and 50% salary, or as pre-arranged, any member of the crew could select and apply to become an owner of any unit they wanted. At the end, they would get a loan for their remaining share to purchase, and the other units left would be sold at market rate. After paying the expense of purchase and the restoration loan, the profits, if any, would be invested in the next project.

I got a nonprofit from California to commit to co-sign, not to give a grant, for the land purchase and construction loan and cover any deficiency at the end, if any. The project was killed in its infancy by the effort of two people, Juanito and his wife on the grounds of discrimination because they were not included, and by Williams the son of the businessman and his wife for reasons unknown to me. They sent a letter full of false information to the California nonprofit and made threatening phone calls, among other things. This time they were successful. From a distance, the California foundation withdrew their offer. It remains a deep enigma for me to this day as to why Williams would get himself involved in an effort that had nothing to do with him. He tried to kill the tractor. He called the papers for a false article. Now this. What was in it for him? What secret agenda did he carry with him that we had yet to uncover?

Normal daily life was not without surprises. One fine evening, walking into a local bar, crowded and full of smoke, I saw Jimmy sitting with a group of friends. I knew Jimmy to be a member of the Communist Party, and I knew some of his friends, not all of them, from the same party also sitting at that table. I went over and sat next to him, in part because there were no empty chairs elsewhere, in part because I felt like listening and not talking much. Unfortunately, I noticed that Jimmy had been drinking too much, more than usual. I made small talk and he talked a lot, then I was about to leave, when Jimmy said out of the blue, “How are things going with your work in the Barrio?”

“I don’t really know.” I answered in a noncommittal way. “Some change comes slowly, and I lose patience, but it will all turn out OK.”

Changing the tone of his voice, Jimmy looked sideways at some of his friends at the table, and then looked at me, and leaning over closer, he slurred, “You understand that you are one of the people we have to kill first.”

I already knew that. “Why so?”

“Because of the way you think.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I knew he would not remember much of what he said next day, it was probably the result of their cell conversation in previous days. It is not how I think, it is what I did. Getting up, I went to another table and intentionally sat next to a younger member of the same Communist Party whom I casually knew from sight. Needing some information, these people were very good at certain organizational techniques. Even if you know they are guarded, it is easy to talk about politics and ideology with them, and we were soon engaged in a conversation having to do with Latin America and Europe. It may have been because he saw me coming from a conversation with Jimmy that he assumed that I could be spoken with more openly, as a comrade or recruit.

The young man was saying, “…Reagan is so intent on winning the Cold War that his Administration is rationalizing the use of the most barbaric actions ever committed by the U.S. They are supporting rightwing “death squads” now terrorizing many of the countries in the Third World, especially in Latin America.”

Not knowing much about those issues, I said, “It seems to me that the money the United States is pumping into South America to stop the trafficking of drugs, the growing and selling, but then by not accounting for how it is used, the United States is allowing this money to end up in the pockets of the people on both sides. All the sides are using that money to buy weapons, from the same seller, whom I’ll bet is lobbying the U.S. Government to send more money to stop the drug traffic.”

The young man looked at me sideways. He didn’t disagree, but it did not fit in with his false narrative of U.S. imperialism. Or maybe it did. His agenda was to criticize American Imperialism, not to dig into the root of the problem.

“I have a question for you.” I said to him, “The City Department has sent inspectors to look at our employment books. They want to know how many hours each worker worked. The man doing the inspection found nothing wrong and left.”

“Lucky for you.” He interrupted me, “Their goal is to create a wedge between you and your workers.”

“How so? Does it have to do with the unions not wanting nonunion crews doing construction work?”

“Yes and no. They don’t care much about that. They want to find instances in which you did not pay overtime, then make you pay retroactive and with penalty and in having to do so, create in your workers the impression that you were abusing them. It is not important to them if you were or not.”

“Well, if you owe something, you owe it, but why would they do what you said, what for?”

“In your case, to create disparity, to have your workers complain about you. They wanted to defund or defraud you. The Department doesn’t like what you are doing.  In our case, we use such tricks through the legal and public media system to turn the worker against the ownership, as if for a good cause, to undermine capitalism, and to burden small businesses into failure. Small businesses are the backbone of a country’s good economy, and must be destroyed, the middle class needs to be decimated. The middle class is our enemy. Thus, we can show the rich to be the criminals and the proletariat the victims. It has worked very well in South America, not so well here, not yet.”

I had not seen it that way, that far-reaching. He made it very clear to me that we were on opposite sides in a three-way battle, or rather a war we could not afford to lose. I recognize that there are unscrupulous businesses who abuse workers and underpay while overworking, but they are not hard to find with laws to make them stop. In the Barrio, we were not into that behavior, so why us? I was finding government workers doing the dirty work of others. He gave me good information though, and I thanked him.

By then it was obvious to me that he and Jimmy were not on the same page as to what I was doing. Jimmy knew I had no intent to overthrow the system, while this individual had not caught on yet to that fact. Unrelated incidents were coming together, but the image was still fuzzy. By recruiting the members of the Advisory Council, many unknown things were moving in our favor behind the scenes, but the same could be taking place from the other side. A member on our Board, the enemy from within, had called the media to derail our efforts. Why? The attempt to rehab the 60 units to be rehab by Barrio kids was sabotaged when hardly anyone besides myself knew what was going on. How come and why?

This young man at the bar, had told me that the effort to undermine the middle class was a concentrated effort by well-organized groups. We had City Council members undermining the self-help efforts of their own constituency. Government personnel trying to turn workers against employers. I was the target of a communist cell identifying whom they would have to eliminate. Who was motivating others behind the scenes to damage our efforts? Damage to the tractor loan, the rehab of 60 units, the help of the Advisory Council, facilitating the FBI investigation, attempt at negative news media, defunding an effective rehab program, trying to kill the Self-Help Housing effort illegally, and the many other positive steps to prevent people to lift themselves by the bootstraps? Or was it all just coincidence? A good system was being infiltrated, sabotaged, and it was well hidden. The true enemy from within. Then this infiltration is taking place in our schools, universities, government bureaucracy, even within our military. Sooner or later, it will percolate all the way to the top and impact the highest level of law and order; the Department of Justice. Losing this war is not an option. Humanity is at stake.