Sadness and Joy

This is the collage Facebook presented me with this morning, from pictures I've posted on the thrift store's page in the last 3 days. 

It struck me each pair's expressions mirrored those of the toy figures the shopper is holding: they're  "Sadness" and "Joy"---characters from the Disney movie Inside Out. [trailer on youtube]

I. 200 Books

I'd used the vintage ad for a Presidents' Day sale on clothes.
The couple with the books told me they're doing the "200 Books a Year" challenge, which I'd never heard of.

Looked it up, and it's a response to Warren Buffet:

"Somebody once asked Warren Buffett about his secret to success. Buffett pointed to a stack of books and said,
'Read 500 pages like this every day.

UPDATE: This may be a misquote: Farnham St. quotes him as saying, "Read 500 pages a WEEK"--a much more reasonable number!

That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will...'"

--from "The Simple Truth Behind Reading 200 Books a Year"

I DISLIKE BUFFET's triumphalist tone, and his IGNORANCE:

NOT everyone can read 500 pages a day---that's RIDICULOUS!
I recently posted about women in prison, for instance--some are in jails that HAVE NO BOOKS!
His attitude makes me mad.

UPDATE: OK-- this may be a misquote--he said "500 pages a WEEK" elsewhere, which is doable for many more people.
It's also reported that he recommended 500 pages a day when he was talking to a business school, where probably students are (or should be) reading huge amounts daily.

II. We Don't Need No Thought Control

However, I do agree that education matters--however you get it.
It doesn't have to be reading, per se--could be audio, moving pictures, TALKING & LISTENING, etc.––
any and every thing that helps us get out, beyond our self-referential brains, to expand beyond the borders of our own world/views.

At work I see the narrowing, stunting effect of not having a broader education, of not having layers and layers of knowledge built up, one way or another.

At work, Mr Furniture has been rumbling about "gentrification" of the store. Mr Furniture is an amazing, self-taught artist. He calls himself a "reality artist" because his powerful art is all about the harsh reality of being a black man in America, which he is.

One of his themes, he said, is 
Black-on-Black Violence Is Part of the Master Plan.

Here is Mr Furniture at work, showing me one of the fabric-collage pantsuits he creates. This one is about the deadly East Coast/West Coast, Tupac/Biggie rapper wars that resulted in the murder of Tupac Shakur:

This guy is talented and passionate, and several years ago he brought order to the chaos that was the furniture section, and maintains it. 

But his life has been limited by poverty and racism in HUGE ways, including, for instance, that he is not computer literate, and he doesn't read much. He told me the prison he was in when he was young took away the book he was reading about the Black Panthers. I wonder if he's read a book since...

One of my themes would be,
The Systematized DENIAL of Education to Certain Groups IS Thought Control

One of the effects is that Mr Furniture is, not unreasonably!, wary of white people. 

And white people have been coming into his furniture section and making changes, without his involvement.

III. Gentrification

I never intended to get involved in that section, but my Books borders his Furniture.
And it happens that two of "my" new volunteers are music people, and the LPs are in the furniture section. They crossed the border to rearrange records, which were a total mess. And one thing led to another:
"Wouldn't it make sense if we moved X here?"

YES! It would. And again one thing led to another... "And moved Y there?"

Mr. Furniture told me, "San Francisco," (his nickname for me), "you and the others are gentrifying this place."

Now gentrification is a dirty word to Mr Furniture--and to me. 
In the past couple years, the city has allowed all sorts of new apartment buildings to go up, and they are badly needed. 
But a studio apt. in these new buildings costs $1,200 rent a month!!!

So poor people in the neighborhood of the store––which is Mr Furniture's neighborhood––are being pushed out to the outer suburbs.
BOO!

(I can only afford to work part-time/freelance, now at minimum wage ($10.25/hour), because my friends who own the house with my little upstairs apartment charge me about half the going rent rate: 
I pay a LOW $500/month, which includes everything except my phone--even wifi & laundry.
I love that that affords me a good life, with time to read 500 pages a day. Well, probably more like 50. I am LUCKY!)

Anyway, my goal is not to gentrify the store, in the sense of cleaning up and then raising prices. 
No! 
My goal is to make it nice, and keep prices low: 
why should poor shoppers have to put up with a disorganized and dirty store?

Still, I took Mr Furniture's criticism to heart--and the truth is, if you make stuff nice, richer people come along, and prices do rise.
But mainly, I heard it as a signaling that we were running roughshod over him.

IV. Let's Have a Meeting, She Said Perkily!

Yesterday I called a meeting of all concerned parties. 
It's bothered me that we've made changes without consulting Mr Furniture, and that the changes have been piecemeal.
We should have a plan, I declared, and everyone should be included.

We met yesterday. The movers and shakers were all white or white-passing people with college degrees. We all read books.
That doesn't mean we're oppressors, personally--but we belong to a class that is granted a sense of AGENCY and personal power that is not automatically granted to everyone.

To us, it feels natural to go into a messy situation and think,
"Hey, let's make this better!"

Mr Furniture, classically, said he didn't want to come to the meeting.
Fine, I said.
Then he showed up late and poked holes in every idea someone proposed.

Finally I said, "Let's GO to the furniture section and try out some of these ideas."

That was the ticket!
Mr Furniture got into moving stuff around, and at the end, he said to Michael, the guy who had proposed the biggest changes, "This was a good idea. It looks great!"

Big Boss had some concerns--he was supportive, but I could tell it made him nervous. But we all agreed it would be easy to put things back the way they were, if it didn't pan out.

The new layout does look great, and I think it will pan out.
It should look great: 
Michael is a retired landscape architect. He had approached the meeting with a drawn plan, and the philosophical reasoning behind it.

He told me, "This was a great learning experience for me. I forget that not everyone thinks visually, on paper. We had to get out on the floor and show how it worked, or didn't. And if this doesn't work, we can put it back."

And I thought, THIS is education. 
A group of people with very different world views, very different senses of power, got together and made some changes, hopefully for the better of all.

I truly don't know how it felt for the black guys--was it a reluctant acceptance of something good they felt was foisted on them?
I really hope not. 

Overall, I felt super proud of all of us, and cautiously joyful.
Also, surprised: 
HOW IN THE WORLD did I get here????