Journal 4/28/2000

(Retrospection)

Spent most of the morning in the computer lab. Talked to Sean Vandermuelen and TJ Vandermolen in Fish house, agreed with them to meet at 5 PM that afternoon for the GAP protest. Sean said he would probably be napping at 5, and TJ was a little bit upset at having been left out of the loop but once I explained that it was just because I hadn’t run into him before today he was cool with that explanation.

It was a sunny day after classes, and there was a big crowd hanging out by Enviromental Stewardship Coalition’s Earth Day table, which I helped to man. John Reinders and others were getting ready to go downtown and join the Media Mouse critical Mass Bike ride. (I would have gone with them had I not accidentally scheduled the GAP protest for the same day.) Ruth Terry had David Bytwerk’s book on Michel Foucault. I commented to her that I was interested in Foucault (although all I really knew about Foucault was that he was loosely connected to the May 68 Revolution), but she was getting comments about it from everyone. Apparently Foucault is very popular at Calvin.

Lindsey Broersma wanted to go rock climbing, and was looking for people to come. I talked to Ruth Terry about her film class. Evita went back to the dorm for various reasons and changed her clothes 3 times. We also talked politics (Evita said she was voting for Bush, and Ruth got on her case, but I defended Evita’s right to vote for who ever she wants. Then when I asked her about Bush she didn’t know why she wanted to vote for him. )

Evita Lopez and Lindsey Broersma showed up as well. Eric Ebels and Jordon Adema were dancing with Megan while Peter Lagrand played on his guitar. Rob was there also and he talked to Molly Blacquiere about the guy he was setting her up with. Rob and Bear jokingly tried to hold me back from going to my afternoon class. Then I looked at the time and realized I was actually late for my class, and they let me go once I realized that.

Eventually I ended up at the apartments, where we organized ourselves in Bork’s room. As usual with these kind of things, it took a while to get everyone there. My brother Kyle stopped by as well. He had actually gone to the mall right after school with a couple girls (one of which was Jen Knoll, the other one I didn’t know). He had somehow thought the protest was right after school, and they had gone to the mall to join us. Now he said it was too late and he was just going home. I was disappointed, because I would have loved to have him join us. It would have been some great brother bonding time, and we could have used the extra people on the demonstration. When I talked to him earlier, I had been clear as a bell about what time we were meeting. I repeated it at least a couple times when I talked to him on Monday (he must not have been listening too closely because he was playing video games while we talked).

We did have 8 people total though: Myself, Amber, TJ, Bork, Buma, Evita Lopez, Shandra Pasma, and Daryl. Daryl, because of his ambitions in pursing a career in law enforcement, did not want to risk getting arrested, but agreed to wander around the mall and act as our eyes and ears and messenger.

During the weeks before we had made flyers which called attention to the sweat shop labor practices of the GAP.   (SEE HERE). The plan was to hand them out in the mall, but we knew we would get evicted by mall security. My plan was to split everyone up to make it hard for mall security to find us. Therefore we could distribute a lot of flyers before we all got kicked out. However everyone else in the group wanted to go in pairs instead, so I compromised on this point. Because we had an odd number, and because my mission was to put the flyers up in the GAP store dressing rooms, I volunteered to go solo while everyone else went in pairs.

I was able to get in and out of the GAP dressing rooms without a hitch, and left flyers up in all of them. As a group we were able to cover the mall completely. It was beautiful actually. Our flyers were everywhere. We all kept moving as to be a roving target for mall security.

A group of probably middle school or early high school girls were very intrigued by our work, and stopped me a couple times to ask me questions. On the second time they asked if they could help us distribute the flyers, so I gave them about half of my stack. I forgot to tell them that what we were doing, distributing literature on private property, was technically illegal. I doubt they got in serious trouble for this, but I was later criticized by the others for this.

For the 1st maybe ½ hour or longer we had no confrontation with Mall security. In fact we were almost getting bored. Carol (our supervisor from dorm cleaning the previous summer) and her husband were in the mall, and I passed them a couple of times. They were very supportive about what we were doing and gave me high fives of support.

Daryl then told me that Mall security was out looking for us. He directed me down the wing of the mall they didn’t have covered yet, and so I was able to avoid them for a little longer, before one of them told me to please leave the mall.

We had previously agreed that we didn’t want to risk arrest and would leave as soon as Mall security found us. However I continued to hand out flyers as I walked out of the mall. The same security guy caught up to me and was very upset that I had continued to hand out flyers. I played like I didn’t understand what the problem was since I was on my way out of the mall while I was doing this. He then escorted me all the way out of the mall (radioing in my every turn, and at times I even overheard him telling them what camera to focus on me). Evita had already been caught, and so he knew she was waiting for me by the car.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have led him back to my car. On the other hand, he must have known our car was somewhere, and it would have been difficult to ditch him. Of course in hindsight the best move would have been not to park the car in the Mall lot at all, but park across the street and walk to the mall. That just never occurred to me, but I’ll have to remember that for next time. This was, afterall, our first time doing this thing

Anyway he wrote down my license plate number after following me to the car and threatened to send me the bill to clean up the flyers, which was something I never anticipated.

Shandra and Mike were already waiting outside after having been told to leave. I gave them away perhaps by talking to them in front of the security guard. They had already been kicked out at that point, but it was still stupid of me because it alerted the security guard to the fact that there was a larger group of us. He asked me to go back into the mall and get the rest of my group.

Amber and Evita had been a pair originally, but had split up for some reason. Amber was probably being escorted out as Evita and I were going back into the mall. (There is some game called “slug bug” where you get to hit someone if you see a Volkswagen beetle. I never heard of this game, but Evita got me 3 times as we walked across the mall parking lot).

I ran into TJ and Bork (our last remaining team). They had avoided detection because they were a bit more discrete than the rest of us. They kept the flyers in their pockets and only brought them out when they gave them to people. I told them what had happened to the rest of us, but they were still in full swing and wanted to keep going, so I kept walking and pretended I never saw them. I kept walking, and eventually returned to the car after a nice tour of the mall.

3 police cars arrived outside of the mall. Daryl told Bork and TJ about this new development, and they decided it was a prudent time to leave (there wasn’t much more we could have done anyway. We had blanketed the mall with our flyers). As TJ later said, the cops probably didn’t come all this way to ask us nicely to leave the mall, and none of us wanted to ride downtown in the patrol cars.

We returned to Calvin and hung out in the apartments telling anyone who would listen about our adventures in the mall. It was a good feeling, and we were all still excited and very pleased with ourselves. Gradually people left one by one until it was just me and the boys back at the Courtyard apartments. Matt Poole came over looking to borrow one of Brett’s CDs, and the boys introduced him to the computer game “Counterstrike”. Billy Schultz came over too, and I harassed him about not showing up the night before. I also told him about my afternoon adventures in the mall.

Cecil and Rob played Frisbee in the courtyard, and I hung out with them for a while. A bunch of the gang went to Dance guild, but they eventually came back, Butterball included. I retold my Mall adventures, and Butterball became really upset with me. “Why don’t you just leave those people at the GAP alone and let them run their business?” he said.

He became more and more worked up as we continued the conversation, so I decided I could act like I was upset too. I wasn’t really that mad, but I felt like Butterball thought he could yell at me every time we talked politics and expect me to just be calm and take it. So I deliberately acted like I was angrier at him than I was. Probably not the most mature thing I’ve ever done. “I’ve never been so appalled at your lack of morals as I am right now Butterball. I hope you end up working in a sweat shop someday.” By the end Butterball wouldn’t even talk to me.

In the evening I went to a party with Brian Bork, Mike Buma, Daryl, Dan Westerhoff, Jeremy Haulford and his girlfriend, Amanda and Leanna ( both of whom were girls I worked with dorm cleaning the previous summer). The party was at Joel Westerhof’s place on Chester and Diamond. I saw tons of people I haven’t seen there for a while, although several of these people didn’t recognize me at first because my hair has gotten so long.

* I saw Brian Barnes’ fiancé (who informed me that they were getting married this summer)

*Tom and Shelly (who were working the door at the party and let me in for free because I was designated driver)

*Nick Vanhouten ( who was very surprised to find out we were living with Marc Bakker. He also told me to tell Bosch that he wanted to hang out with him more )

*A whole bunch of 2nd Boer boys were there: (Brad Fuller, Joe Palumbo, Jason Devries, Michael Bossenbrook, Mark Solle). I gave Brad a hard time because I never saw him anymore. He had broken his leg and wasn’t getting around much because of his broken leg. I told Joe and Jason how I had seen them on CVN.

* I talked to Kyle Deroos and Jason Kramer (Kyle is in a class of mine, but attends so rarely I didn’t even know he was in the class).

*I talked to Harvey (Dennis’s old friend. He told me Dennis was doing well).

*Talked to my cousin Allysa Bruinsma (We both complained about our paper in history class)

*Joel Westerhof (who is still working for Weesees landscaping, and thus often is at my parents house doing yard work for them).

And many others. Eventually the cops came, and everyone under 21 was told to leave. (I was sitting outside on the porch with Marcus Fuller when the cops came, and we watched the cop cars drive up). The people who owned the house yelled at all those under age to leave, but everyone was slow in doing so and just gently flooded into the street instead. The cops then tried to get people not to just stand around on the sidewalk and stuff.

J.K. (Who I didn’t know well, but had been one year below me at Christian High), was out looking for a fight, and started yelling at this kid in the church parking lot where everyone had parked their cars. I don’t know what the kid had done, but J.K. was just trying to get him to fight. J.K. was really looking stupid, going out of his way to play the hard ass. The kid in question was Canadian, and because the party was at Joel Westerhof’s house, about half of the party goers were Canadians as well, and so the sympathy was somewhat split along national lines. (That is, to the extent J.K. had any sympathy at all. Even his friends were looking a bit embarrassed by his behavior.)

J.K. was convinced to leave, but as he left he make threats to kick the kid’s ass later when he wasn’t expecting it.

There was another party just a couple blocks down which Bork, Buma, me and the rest of the gang walked to, and we ended up going back and forth a lot deciding which party we wanted to go to. The gang was quite impressed that where ever we went I knew a lot of people. They made jokes about what a socialite I was.

Eventually we wound up back at Joel Westerhof’s place. The cops had left by this point. I am of course 22, but all the people I was with were still underage, so they were somewhat cautious.

We hung out there a while longer. Buma and I wanted to head back, but Bork wanted to stay, so we kept staying longer as a compromise. I wasn’t having all that bad of a time anyway. Buma had drank a lot of Beers, 10 by the time we ended up leaving. He certainly held his beers quite well-probably due to his Canadian upbringing. But he did become more silly, and stumbled a bit on stairs, and was hiccuping a lot, but other then that held things well.

When we were walking back to the Calvin apartments, Buma had such a hard time on the stairs (falling twice) that I eventually just put his arm over my shoulder and steadied him. Dan Westerhof was laughing so hard he couldn’t even open the door for a while. Eventually we got Buma inside.

I hung out with the Boys back in the Delta apartment. Margaret Irwin’s brother Jon was staying with us, and my boys had already gotten him addicted to Coutnerstrike. We talked for a while and then went to bed.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
In the fall of 2000, Andy Schrier and Laura Carpenter started the Hattie Beverly Tutoring Center, named in honor of Beverly. It continues to serve Grand Rapids's Southeast Side (specifically the Madison Neighborhood)

Link of the Day
Via Whisky Prajer, here's an interesting Slate article comparing the 4 different versions of "The Office". Very interesting article, even though I have to admit I've still only seen the British one.