Dear Bill Wells,
After your reactions to the shooting of Alfred Olango last year as well as the recent Break the Ban/Food Not Bombs protests at Wells Park, I've noticed a pattern in you. In both occasions, you've labeled the protesters and activists as too "antagonistic" to work with and dismiss their claims as purely "political".

Can protesters and activists become antagonistic sometimes, yes. However this is not political. In one case, we have an unarmed man - a refugee who wasn't doing anything to endanger anybody - who was shot and killed by YOUR police department, while he was having a breakdown. That man was a father, a brother, and a son. The family has been so hurt by this event that they have started a foundation that I have been fortunate enough to become involved with. To the family of Alfred Olango, this is not political, they want justice.

The second case involves our most vulnerable and disenfranchised - some of them veterans - being discriminated upon under the guise of a health and safety emergency. A health and safety emergency that could be remedied by keeping the restroom facilities opened and maintained. In Wells Park, there is a restroom facility that has been closed since about June because that's when the pipes burst, yet instead of fixing the running water, your council chose to install some dirty-ass porta-potties in front of the building.

Then when this health and safety emergency emerged, you didn't vote to fix the city's water pipes, you voted instead to ban people from feeding the homeless, but left exceptions for "family reunions, birthday parties, baptisms, youth sport team celebrations, school field trips and wedding anniversaries". In other words, you left everything else exempt. The homeless are not criminals - they're humans - but they are being criminalized with every new ordinance that bans pan-handling or bans setting up tents or sleeping in cars. To them, this is not political, they just want to sleep.

To these people, as well as myself, it's not about politics, it's about morality. I would quote Dr. King about what to do about unjust laws, but I think you've already had a helping of that. I understand that discrediting people who you think are "political foes" is easy for you to do, but to be honest, I had to look up your political views, and only because I knew I was going to write about this. I didn't care about your affiliation then and I don't care about it now - this isn't political. While I looked you up, I came across this oped you did where you blame the California State Legislature for the recent homeless issues. Your premise for that was Assembly Bill 109, which redefined many state laws as "less serious" or "non-violent". You literally start by complaining how people are NOT going to jail as the actual problem and if that isn't politicizing an issue, I don't know what is.

I mean, none of us are actually politicians, but you're the mayor of a city. You're the only one here who is actually IN politics. Yet after telling you the story about her homeless family member who is missing, you then accused Shane Parmely of playing politics during the September 14th town hall meeting.

No. Shane was trying to appeal to your humanity. You had used the same "political" excuse on Reverend Shane Harris when he and others asked to meet with you over the Alfred Olango shooting last year.

Another issue I wanted to address was how you seem to enjoy explaining your claims of how infected homeless people like to defecate on the grass, before people who come to feed them put food on the poopy grass, before serving the poopy food to the homeless and that's how Hep-A is passed. During the first Break the Ban protest, the Mother Goose parade was going on and part of Wells Park was used as a horse stable. The horses crapped all over the park, sidewalk and grass that day, and was left there for at least five hours, probably longer. By then the horse owners were gone and I can only assume that the same people who supposedly complain about keeping the parks clean from the homeless, happily cleaned up after the horses. Because the Mother Goose parade has gone on since forever, I can only assume these horses come and leave tons of feces at the park once every year, and it's all cool. I also noticed a healthy dose of dog poop that doesn't get picked up in the park, but those dogs and horses have homes I guess.

Regarding Ben Kalasho and his gift card idea, it wouldn't be a bad idea except restaurants don't like homeless people going into their establishments. Everybody knows this. Pretending to empower starving people by giving them a "choice" between getting kicked out of a Wendy's or a Carl's Jr. does nothing for their stomachs, much less their dignity. Also, I'm betting someone would profit greatly from this idea and it would not be the homeless.

Lastly Mayor Wells, you say that homelessness is a choice for many. I don't understand how understanding THAT would help ME understand why homeless people don't deserve to be fed in a park. I don't understand why these people should be punished anymore than they already are by society, and I don't understand how someone who is supposed to be good at math and medicine would come up with this kind of solution, and then label the opposition as "political".  This whole thing is a mess that was started by your city council and it's one that either you and the city council will fix, or a judge.

This isn't a game to us, Mr. Mayor.

This is not political.

-JB

We learned from Martin Luther King, that if a law is unjust, it must be challenged and overturned. The original injustice here is how the cities in San Diego County treat the homeless. In an attempt to make the homeless go away and attract more businesses, authorities put rocks under bridges and installed benches that are hard to lie down on, as preparation for the 2016 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. In El Cajon, the city banned panhandling, then banned "camping"  then sent the police to raid the parks nightly to kick out the homeless. They even passed a law against sleeping in you car. They then closed or took away restrooms and hand washing stations in both cities. Closing restrooms doesn't stop mother nature however, and so without adequate places to clean up, disease spread and the cities county-wide, caused a hepatitis-A outbreak, which killed about 20 people.  However, the most blatant example of callousness against the homeless began shortly after the outbreak, when the city of El Cajon decided to make it illegal to feed the homeless in parks, pretending there was a link between the feeding homeless and hepatitis.

Text of the unjust ban "food sharing" events in city parks. (Urgency Ordinance 5066)

However, they also added a number of exemptions to the law, such as birthdays, family reunions, and field trips. This makes the law discriminatory in nature and so it wasn't long before activists started non-violent, non-compliant feedings in direct defiance of the law. The protest was dubbed "Break the Ban", organized by Shane Parmely and Mark Lane as well as Food Not Bombs, and took place at Wells Park in El Cajon. A week before the first event, the organizers went to the city council meeting to announce the event, when Shane got into a debate with the Mayor of El Cajon over things like the exceptions to the ban. Here is the video of that. 

Also of note was that Mayor Wells had to have the exemptions explained to him, showing he obviously never read the ordinance he helped pass. The following week, the first protest feeding happened in the shadow of the City's annual Mother Goose Parade, which turned part of Wells Park into a horse stable.

Here is a close up of one of the signs they put up to warn against feeding the homeless:

 Health and safety was obviously a guise to discriminate against the homeless, otherwise, they would not have all of these exemptions, and they would have treated the situation with the horse manure with more urgency. The Mayor didn't seem to like this protest and sent an ominous threat of "escalation" over the news. The following week was Thanksgiving and another feeding event took place that I didn't attend or witness. The day after that was the third feeding.  The video for that is here.

There was a little bit of a pause after this feeding, but the next one was scheduled for 12/22/2017 and organized by Food Not Bombs. On 12/13/2017, Shane Parmely again addressed the city council, announcing the event.

Sometime before the feeding, we learned that the city had put up a new trailer in the park. A hose and a power line connected water and electricity to it from the closed restroom facilities and it is very possible there is a clean toilet in the trailer that nobody in the park can use.

The event took place as planned, except El Cajon police officers did arrive to pass out warnings and stayed to observe the start of the feedings. Unfortunately, media didn't arrive to cover the event. My video for that event is here.

These are what the warnings say, in case you're wondering.

So these threats weren't going to sway us. Good people were going to keep organizing and feeding the homeless in defiance of the law until the City, or a judge overturned it. These laws were discriminatory, by the nature if its exemptions, and has the effect of giving the homeless a false sense of inferiority.

These food events are not an escalation of anything, as the Mayor suggested - the only escalation was on his part as he continued to attack the homeless and those who wished to help them, by passing unjust laws - rather it's a continuation of charitable services that they had already been getting before the City intervened. Most importantly, as a person who has been lucky enough to have a home, I know that it could all change in an instant. People who are blessed want to give back to the community, especially to our most vulnerable, because it is the right thing to do.

The next town hall meeting was January 9th, 2018. Citizen after citizen pleaded to work with the city council for a solution, but their wishes were all ignored. When you don't see in the video was a lady pleading to legalize keeping ferrets as pets. While I have no problem with that, I have a problem with the city council agreeing to meet with them and not with our group.

The next feeding was January 14, 2018, which was the day before Martin Luther King's birthday, so that theme was in us when we went to El Cajon once again, believing that this time, they would enforce the laws.

The following day, part of the group that got arrested gave a press conference with their lawyers.

The next feeding is January 27, 2018 at Wells Park in El Cajon, Ca. Come get arrested with us!

For more context, please check out this other blog entry by someone much more analytical than I.

I've noticed that I am talking more and more with people who are pro-Russia and anti-Clinton. I don't really care about the anti-Clinton stuff anymore, since she already lost and so it's become more of a red flag for me when I talk to people. It tells me that they don't want me to pay attention to the Russian conspiracy, but to some other weird thing. Why? Maybe because they're paid to. Maybe because they believe it. Who knows, what I do know is that I am a man of logic, and if you can't come up with a logical argument, then it becomes harder to convince me. 

Many who I have talked to also get frustrated when I play by their rules and don't like it when I out their methods of distraction. The following discussion happened today:

"Ryan" tries to trigger me, but I'm divorced and so I don't trigger that easily anymore, before #CNN = #FAKENEWS+++ returns. (I'll call him "Pete" from now on)

Figuring he's a troll, because he was taking a small article from the Hill and trying to expand it into a full blown conspiracy, I asked Pete not to ignore my argument. He said he'd respond to it by tomorrow, but wanted to leave me with a last question, which I almost immediately respond to.

I finished my point by posting a picture of Flynn and Stein having dinner with Putin last year. This seemed to trigger Pete, who started posting fast, short tweets.

He mentions Louis Mensch, which is another red flag for me as well, because she's already blocked me and is part of a whole different issue involving block lists...

But he asked me why I cared so much about Russia when the REAL conspiracy was happening between Obama and Mexico... or something like that. I called out his argument as "whataboutism", so he tried one last time to swing me with his sophist argument...

...before he finally blocked me. He provided no evidence of this last conspiracy theory.

So fellow resistors, use this debate as a reference. Don't just learn how to speak, learn how to analyze what your opponent is doing. Learn the difference between Socratic dialogue and sophistry. Keep the opponent's goals of division and distraction in mind and scrutinize their evidence.

If you are knowledgeable enough, try to veer them out of their argument and hit them with curve balls like I did with the picture of Flynn having dinner with Putin. Their rants will help you understand what their intentions really are. I wasn't expecting to talk to this person today, but I hope my experience with him can help teach others that these guys can be defeated.
Stay woke.
-"Jack"