America, Occupied

Willie Edwards, 41.

By Ezra Silk

OAKLAND — Willie Edwards, 41, a truck driver from Goldsboro, North Carolina, was idling at the Port of Oakland. Several dozen Occupy Oakland protesters were circling back and forth in front of Terminal 21, successfully picketing his morning destination. Edwards’ purple rig, leading a fleet of ten other semi-trailers, had been rumbling in front of the Terminal for over an hour.

Edwards, an independent contractor for C.R. England, had arrived in Oakland the night before. His bosses had ordered him to be non-confrontational with the protesters, he told me. As a conflict-averse person who believes in economic justice, that dictate would be easily followed, Edwards said.

But as a poor trucker with little interest in joining a union, Edwards was not as sanguine about the prospect of losing his morning wages on behalf of Occupy Oakland.

“I’m for justice, but this puts me in the seat, because I’m part of the 99,” Edwards said. “And you know, I’m poor. I work every day. I can’t stop and protest. I stop and protest, my daughter doesn’t eat, you know? My mother doesn’t get her heat put on. So I’m in a jam also. But it means a lot, because as far as Wall Street goes, somebody is hurting somebody’s pockets. Fortunately, I have a job. But a lot of people aren’t in the position that they were, and they feel robbed of something.”

“This is why they here,” Edwards added. “This is all because of Wall Street. It’s not because of me delivering to the port. This is because of the one percent that’s ruining the 99 percent.”

Still, Edwards said, he could survive the loss of one day’s wages. A three-day or week-long shut down, on the other hand, could be disastrous.

I asked Edwards how he felt about the Occupy movement, in general.

“I don’t have any feelings,” he said. “I don’t have any feelings about them. All I know is somebody’s hurting. ‘Cuz if not, they wouldn’t have been standing on trucks at the last protest…They wouldn’t have did what they did.”

And are these protesters fighting for you, I asked?

“They’re fighting for their cause,” he said. “If it was my cause, I would be there.”

Picketers block Edwards' purple semi-trailer.

Edwards said his cause was to both work and avoid incarceration.

“My cause is to just work, man, get my job done and take care of my daughter and just live,” he said. “Anything that gotta do with confrontation, I stay as far from it, because when it comes to confrontation and me being who I am, it’s not good for me. Anything that’s confrontational for me is not good. Because I’m gonna get dealt the bad end of the hammer, so to speak. If I get in anything confrontational, anything minor, anything got to do with law enforcement coming, I’m done. That’s why you don’t see many black folks out at protests.”

I asked Edwards whether poor blacks regard the Occupy protests as a white movement. Occupy is seen not as a white movement, he said, but as a middle class movement.

“They’re fighting for a reason,” he said. “This is not for no reason. But for me to feel anything about it, or to be affected about it — I’ve been affected by this for centuries. You know what I’m saying? I get this.”

“I don’t have an inner knowledge of what this is,” he added. “All I know is that the middle class is being affected by government policies and they’re speaking out about it. You know, the news is crazy. Being a driver, I listen to the news while I’m driving. Everything is crazy. And everything is about the middle class is being pushed, you know, they’re being pushed into the poor class, so that there won’t be a middle class anymore. And the middle class is teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen, like the first responders, firemen, volunteers at the Red Cross. When you think of the middle class, you think of all these people.”

And without a strong middle class, Edwards said, his life could become even more difficult.

“I’m from the ghetto,” he said. “I’m real poor. When I go home, I still go back to the ghetto. I’m the working poor…I don’t vote, because I don’t think I have a voice. The poor has never had a voice. The middle class has always spoken for the poor. The middle class has always educated the poor. So the middle class is our first line of defense, even though we still don’t have a voice.”

“This is the middle class defending itself in order to keep trying to defend the poor,” Edwards said, referring to the protests. “Because if the middle class goes, then you will just have the haves and the haves-not — which will be the poor and the rich.”

Given their circumstances, why aren’t the poor rising up, I asked?

“I think because for a fear of, of retaliation, you know, from the administration,” Edwards said. “I think because we’ve been poor so long, and are used to just going along and living with what we have, that it doesn’t affect us either way. It doesn’t affect us either way. If we get help, we get help. If we don’t, we just have to make do. That’s how it’s always been. And that’s why I think nobody’s really out here like that in those numbers, and basically, I think it’s mainly, I think it’s mainly a strategy of, ‘If I go out there and get arrested, my family is gonna be in deeper trouble.’”

“As for the middle class, the middle class who are knowledgeable about economics and about saving, and you know, they have a economic pyramid, where they can try to protest, they wouldn’t be hurt too much,” he added. “Now when you think about the poor, there’s no economic pyramid. Economic day-to-day struggle. And on a day-to-day struggle, if you don’t know whether you’re gonna eat this afternoon, or if you gotta feed two of your children or if you can only feed three of them children, and you and two more of your kids starve, you know you can’t really come out and protest, because if you get locked up, you got five kids that don’t eat, and DSS comes in and takes away your children. So when you get out of prison, you go back into the court system for neglect of your children. And ain’t none if it your fault. You was just trying to fight for something that you believed in. So now you have no children, now you have no home, now you’ve got the court case against you, and you are fighting to get five kids back, when you were trying to fight for those five kids so you could feed them, and I think that’s why black people as a whole are not showing up.”

I wanted to know what Edwards thought about the President.

“This guy, man, it took him a long time — it took him a long time! — to act, a very long time to act, as far as the middle class is concerned,” he said. “This issue didn’t just start. And the Democrats had the House for at least two years. I mean, you don’t wait ‘til the roof is on fire to go in the house and tell everybody, ‘Hey the house is on fire.’ If you see smoke, there’s fire!”

So when did Obama start letting people know that the roof was on fire, I asked?

“After it was burning!” he said. “After it was burning! The top floor was already burning! There’s only one floor left.”

Now, given the pending legislation that could potentially sanction the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial, the poor are even more unlikely to take it to the streets, Edwards added.

“It puts a twist on things, so you definitely not gonna see us out there,” Edwards said. “But middle-class whites and middle-class blacks who got that economic base, they’re not scared any more. They can pass whatever legislation they want to pass, they can set up however many police barricades they want to set up, they can bring in the National Guard if they want to — they’re not gonna stop it.”

Why not, I asked?

“Why not?” Edwards said. “Cuz it’s their lives at stake. And not only their lives, but it’s everybody’s lives except the one percent.”