The Second Convoy

IGNORANCE

The darkness became all consuming — I wasn’t depressed, but sad… and angry.

It may have been the numbers: a half a million Americans are getting a gift every year worth more than most earn each year. At the same time, a half a million Americans are homeless and being left out in the cold on any given night.

It may have been first-hand experience: a dialysis clinic is a crosssection of humanity. The gift is granted fairly’, especially in California. If you need dialysis, you will get dialysis. Well… if you can make it to the clinic, you can keep your job during it, you can manage a fairly precise schedule, and you can stay healthy — e.g. in spite of sleeping outside all night.

I could see this cross-section every other day, and how extra-hard it was for those coping with being homeless. Nothing was different about their humanity: the person with the latest iPhone is being kept alive by the same kind of machines (and vampire) that the homeless person is.

It may have been the partial employment-enslavement of the vampires. Being forced to work when and where a monopolistic employer wants is initially frustrating and eventually depressing & debilitating. This frustration had not built up that far in me yet, but I could feel it growing. And Susan & others were clearly far beyond frustration.

‘A Veil of Ignorance’ — is a way to determine if something is fair. It is generic version of “You split the cookie, I pick the half”, except it works when the universe splits the cookie for us both. Given the creation of two life scenarios — two ‘lots in life’ and society ’s behavior around them — if you and I don’t know which

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lot we are in, would we accept that the two scenarios are fair. Would we freely accept being in either lot. Lot-1: need life-sustaining dialysis… and you get fifty thousand dollars. Lot-2: need a lifesustaining home… and you get nothing. You do not know which will be your lot in life. Let’s flip a coin. Sound good? Sound fair?

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CONVOY

The convoy starts moving at 1 a.m.. Today is Saturday, July 2nd of the July 4th weekend, which we hope will be symbolic. It being a Saturday means the Tuesday–Thursday–Saturday dialysis groups will be affected first by our encampment, but all local dialysis patients will be affected by July 4th. Our fleet of 24 Freightliners (half electric, half diesel Cascadias) is pulling two dozen 40-foot containers. A dozen Ford 650 Box Trucks are carrying supplies and tiny houses in collapsed form. And a dozen Ford F-450 Duallies are pulling 5th-wheelers: predominantly Living Vehicle (LV) Pro models for their solar power. Two tanker trucks are full of mostly diesel with some gasoline mixed in. Two more are full of potable water. There are also a large number of Jerry Cans of diesel and gasoline, along with lots of other supplies including water in 3.5 gallon storage ‘Lego Blocks’ redundantly dispersed around all two dozen containers. We spaced the departure of each truck by about a minute, with an escort SUV for each vehicle.

It took almost an hour to get the final of the 52 trucks on the road. The first half of the trucks had parked before the second even started, so we only needed a couple dozen escorts. ❦

Our encampment — is the empty parking lot of the mostly vacant Peninsula Boardwalk shopping center. This used to be thriving with a Toys R’ Us and other magnet stores. But the universe killed those stores, and only a rarely patronized Sports Basement eventually took its place. The shopping center is notable in a few ways: first, it is right next to the 101 Freeway that is the major corridor up the peninsula side of the Bay Area. Billions of dollars and millions of people travel that road, many of them to Facebook/Meta, Google/Alpha, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The parking lot is visible from the 101, so everyone will see our

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presence as of sunlight. It should be newsworthy.

Second, the shopping center is right next to the canal to what was a low-cost housing area on the bay. People lived in house boats in the canal and marina on the Bay side of the freeway. Presumably the name ‘Boardwalk’ was meant to conjure being on the bay or ocean. But that inexpensive housing approach was recently transformed into $1M+ homes at much lower density, and the house boats kicked out. Affordable housing became insanely unaffordable housing in exactly the same area of the city.

Third, the parking lot is not being used even to ten-percent of its capacity because the car traffic to the shopping center is insignificant. All the people shopping there could easily use the nonfreeway side parking without having to compete for spaces. At worse they have to walk around or through the Kohl, like they would in any indoor mall.

Fourth, the parking lot is quite large, and we can easily create a 600-foot x 150-foot (2 acres) space within it. The perimeter is established by the Cascadias and their trailers, where each is 70 feet long. Including some amount of overlap and redundancy, the perimeter is 3 + 9 + 3 + 9 = 24 rigs. Six of the rigs create makeshift sliding doors on each end. A hill to the 101 forms the NorthEast border, the Sports Basement forms the South-West, there is a bridge over the canal in the North-West entrance, and the main entrance is the rest of the parking lot to the South-East. Our encampment isn’t a fort, but you also couldn’t wheel up an armored battalion and just roll over us. At least, not without it being an entertaining scene to those on the 101. ❦

The perimeter of ‘Boardwalk’ is set up — as the last rigs (which become the doors) roll in. We are working rapidly to get the containers on the ground and stowing the chassis out of the way in

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