Kris: "Punk Librarian"

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Then I wanted to get a little deeper, like, where did these people come from? So I had a friend who had an older sister that was more plugged in to everything going on. Right. So then I got a. You know, I got a mixtape. [00:00:12] Speaker B: You got a mixtape with a bunch. [00:00:13] Speaker A: Of bands on it that he gave to me. And, you know, none of these bands were popular. You know, they were unknown to any mainstream audience. But that was the first time I kind of tapped into this underground network of people who are interested in digging a little deeper, and it was the punk rock scene. Foreign. [00:00:59] Speaker B: S. Welcome back to the Collective Table podcast. This is Jason, and I'm so excited to be your host today. This season, we're making the case for empathy through stories of everyday people just like you. Today's story takes some surprising twists and turns, from the stacks of a local library to the hills of Guatemala to the punk rock scene in Provo, Utah. That's right, Provo, Utah. This is Chris's story. I think one thing that most people, even if they know you, like, might not know, is that you are a librarian. [00:01:42] Speaker A: You got me? That's true. [00:01:45] Speaker B: Chris and his family started showing up at the Oceanside Sanctuary right after the COVID 19 lockdowns. He and his wife both grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but they'd been wrestling with the LDS Church's stance on social issues like gay marriage and systemic racism for years. [00:02:03] Speaker A: But, yeah, I was also raised in a religious household that was. We were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, often known as the Mormons. And, you know, a lot of the stories that, you know, we're told and we're given as young people are about being kind to others. You know, think about the stories of Jesus. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:26] Speaker A: And the way he treated people, and it's like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. [00:02:31] Speaker B: That's pretty much what led Chris to become a librarian. And hearing him talk about libraries is where we get our first glimpse of how deeply empathetic he is. [00:02:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it's rare. It's rare these days to find anywhere where you can go and just feel welcome and. And not have anyone telling you to do something or not do something or, you know, like, pressured to spend money or whatever. [00:02:54] Speaker B: It's right. [00:02:54] Speaker A: It's outside of that realm of capitalism. I think. [00:02:58] Speaker B: For Chris, libraries are vital threads in the social fabric of a community. Spaces where all kinds of people from all walks of life can show up and connect freely. [00:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah, we have, you know, newborn babies to over 100 year old people that come through our doors and they do what they do. So sometimes we don't know half. You know, some people love to tell us whatever they're up to and with their health issues, all that kind of stuff, because it is a place of social connection. [00:03:29] Speaker B: Chris pointed me to a 2018 book by sociologist Eric Klinenberg called Palaces for the People. In it, Klinenberg argues that the strength of a society depends not only on its hard infrastructure, like roads and bridges, but also on its social infrastructure. And his primary example is public libraries. Klinenberg argues that when we invest in social infrastructure, we foster stronger communities. Chris shared this case in point. [00:04:01] Speaker A: So we've been hosting citizenship classes for people who are interested in becoming citizens. And we had, I think, close to 30 students that were interested in participating in this 10 week long journey of studying for the interview questions and stuff like that. And we had someone who came in and was so excited that she passed her interview and was just like, you know, super happy that we had provided the class. She came back and told us she passed. And she came back and continued on with the class the rest of the time to encourage everyone and to kind of help with they're studying and to give them a little bit of a heads up of here's what's going to happen when you go. Apparently she was not treated very nicely while she was there doing the interview. They were very rude to her and disrespectful. But she had a lawyer with her, luckily. [00:04:54] Speaker B: Wow. [00:04:54] Speaker A: And that kind of helped her navigate that difficult situation. [00:04:59] Speaker B: And it turns out strong social infrastructure like this even helps neighborhoods withstand a serious local crisis. [00:05:08] Speaker A: Libraries end up being a huge part of that. Communities that are healthy and where people can kind of navigate through difficult times are places with a lot of social infrastructure in place. And, you know, he has an example in the book about two neighborhoods in Chicago that were pretty much mirror image of each other. Very similar demographics. One neighborhood was able to get through. There was like a heat wave. I believe it was okay. And it ended up killing people. You know, it was like that bad. In one neighborhood they had a number of deaths. In another neighborhood they had very few. And they were kind of, how could that be? You know. And they were realizing that it's the social infrastructure that were built up in different neighborhoods was different. And so having the library, having the community centers, having parks, having little small businesses often, you know, serve as those types of places where people check in on each other and are used to seeing each other and then they're more Resilient because of it. [00:06:08] Speaker B: So I gotta say, everything Chris is describing here, inclusive spaces, free resources, civic relationships, all of that feels very empathetic to me. In fact, I think you could say that what Klinenberg calls social infrastructure is really empathy at scale. Because it's not just one person moved by the needs of others. It's a whole population, or at least a majority of the population, who care enough about other people's needs to build these kinds of institutions. So what does it mean then for our communities, for our society, that at this moment in history, a pretty large portion of our political and religious traditions seem to be rejecting empathy? [00:07:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the idea of libraries in general, a public library, if you propose this idea right now, today, it wouldn't go through Congress. There's no way. There's no way it would happen. [00:07:19] Speaker C: Hello, Collective Table listeners, it's CJ again. A lot of people out there might not realize that this podcast is part of a real life faith community. The Collective Table podcast is a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary, a progressive Christian community whose mission is to foster collective expressions of inclusive, inspiring and impactful Christian spirituality wherever it is needed. And as a 501c3 nonprofit organization, that mission is only possible because of the generosity of people just like you. So if you believe in what we are doing, if you benefit from this mission, please Visit [email protected] Give to Become a Supporter today. Together, we can keep building communities of love and liberation. [00:08:17] Speaker B: Chris didn't even consider becoming a librarian until after college. But after his freshman year, he had an experience that would profoundly affect him. Like many young Latter Day Saints, Chris embarked on a two year mission trip. His destination, Guatemala. [00:08:34] Speaker A: I was with all these people who had, like, essentially like nothing, you know, living in pretty extreme poverty. And I was working with these people every day. And we're laughing alongside each other, we're helping each other out. You know, they're laughing at me because I can't speak Spanish, you know, all that stuff. But, you know, I was just seeing how, how similar they were to anyone I would have met anywhere else, you. [00:09:03] Speaker B: Know, like in the US Witnessing so much poverty among people that he'd come to know and care for raised unsettling questions for Chris. [00:09:14] Speaker A: I just felt like, why in the world do these people have nothing? You know? So then I started digging in a little bit. When I got back home, I started digging into, like, some history, right? And I'm like, oh. In 1954, the US basically conducted a coup to get rid of the democratically elected leader. [00:09:36] Speaker B: Wait, did you catch that? This is where Chris's story overlaps with Victoria's story from episode four. To flesh that out, we need a bit more context. So you may remember from episode four that much of the poverty and violence in Guatemala resulted from a brutal civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. That civil war was the result of a U S backed coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. And Arbenz was just the second democratically elected leader in Guatemalan history. Before 1944, Guatemala had been ruled by a string of dictators who made deals with U.S. companies to operate coffee and tropical fruit plantations. The most powerful of these was the United Fruit company, which owned 42% of the total land mass. Their primary crop was bananas. You know them today as Chiquita banana. Prior to this, those lands belonged to indigenous Mayans. But they weren't just dispossessed of their land. The United Fruit Company also needed laborers. So Guatemala's dictators instituted laws that forced all adult males to be employed by a minimum of 150 days per year. Men who couldn't prove that they'd met those requirements were branded as vagrants. And under those same laws, a vagrant could be forced to work for free. But it was the plantations who issued proof of work, which they often refused, which resulted in more vagrants, which gave them more free labor. On top of that, laborers lived on the plantations, but they often had to pay the plantation for their food, their shelter or the use of tools for their work. These fees resulted in overwhelming debts that could only be paid back through, you guessed it, free Labor. But by 1944, a pro democracy movement had gained traction in Guatemala, led by primarily by university students and labor unions. In October, Jacobo Arbenz led a coup that toppled the corrupt government and conducted the first free and fair elections in Guatemalan history. The pro democracy government immediately set about reforming the country and returning the land to peasant farmers. Today, Guatemalans refer to this period as the 10 years of spring or the time of freedom. All the while, the United Fruit Company was lobbying with the US government to do something about this. And in 1952 US President Harry Truman authorized Operation Fortune, which directed the CIA to overthrow the Guatemalan government. Two years later, in 1954, they succeeded and they installed a far right military dictator named Carlos Castillo Armas. He promptly rolled back the reforms of the revolution and handed the land back to the United Fruit Company. This story is not unique to Guatemala. During the 20th century, the United States intervened in no less than 13 Latin American and Caribbean nations. Guatemala in 1954, Panama in 1903 and 1989, Nicaragua from 1909 to the 1980s, Honduras from 1911 to 2009, Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, Bolivia in 1952 and 1971, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976, El Salvador throughout the 1980s, Cuba from 1898 all the way to 1959, and Colombia from 1895 to this very day. In every case, the US either overthrew democratically elected leaders or installed military dictatorships that fostered conditions of extreme poverty and violence that killed and displaced millions of Latin Americans, many of whom fled and continue to flee to the United States. Oh, and one more thing. The US Government official who lobbied for intervention in Guatemala was a man named John Foster Dulles. At that time, he was the US Secretary of State. But before that, he was a lawyer for 40 years for the United Fruit Company and the person responsible for overseeing Operation Fortune. Well, that was the director of the CIA. His name was Allen Dulles. John Foster Dulles, brother. And what did Alan do before serving as the director of the CIA? He spent 10 years as a member of the board of directors for the United Fruit Company. I have to say, all this strikes me as very antisocial behavior on the part of the United States. And here's the thing. When antisocial behavior becomes destructive, it's considered a clinical disorder. The word for that is sociopathy. You may remember in the last episode, we said that affective empathy without cognitive empathy can reinforce our biases and lead to compassion fatigue. But in his 2011 book, the Science of Evil, psychologist Simon Baron Cohen argues that cognitive empathy without affective empathy results in sociopathy. In essence, it's reason without emotions. And that enables sociopaths to really effectively manipulate people. They understand very well what makes you hurt, and they can use that to their advantage because they lack the moral emotions necessary to restrain destructive behavior. In this sense, sociopathy isn't the complete opposite of empathy. It's more like the perverse inversion of it. Right about now, you may be wondering, what does all this have to do with Chris's story? Well, everything, because Chris was awakening to these very real injustices and watching it unfold in front of him during his mission. [00:16:50] Speaker A: So anyway, you have these big corporations who are just have so much land, and then I literally saw people squatting on, like, hillsides just to have Any scrap of land to call their own. And this. This wasn't their land to have. [00:17:06] Speaker B: Right? [00:17:06] Speaker A: It was the electric company or whatever it was. And they started building little shacks. And, you know, I saw. I was there the first day they went and, like, started, we're gonna take over this place. This is gonna be our neighborhood from now on. So I saw that. [00:17:22] Speaker B: So that moment right there is where we hear the full expression of empathy at work in Chris story. Two years in Guatemala had instilled in Chris a strong affective empathy for the suffering he witnessed. And after learning about the history of Guatemala, he gained cognitive empathy. He understood all that suffering was largely due to the fact that corporate American greed was in control of the most powerful government on Earth. And he was ready to do something about it. [00:18:07] Speaker C: Hey, everyone, it's cj. We hope you're enjoying the collective table and finding something meaningful here, something that connects with your heart and your journey. If you are, we'd love for you to help others find it too. The best way to do that is simple. Rate and follow the collective table wherever you listen to podcasts. When you follow, you'll never miss a new episode. And when you leave a rating or a short review, it helps more people discover this community of love, liberation, and faith in action. And while you're at it, share an episode with a friend, someone you think might find encouragement, hope, or inspiration in these conversations. It only takes a moment, but it makes a big difference. So go ahead, tap that follow button, leave us a quick review, and share the collective table with someone who could use it today. Thanks for listening and for being a part of the collective table. [00:19:15] Speaker B: Back in high school, long before Chris went on his mission to Guatemala, he'd been introduced to punk rock, and he was hooked. When he returned from his mission, he jumped back into that scene. [00:19:29] Speaker A: I was, like, really, like, just starving for that. I felt like I just, like, I needed it so badly. So I was just, like, soaking in all these new bands and these new things and fanzines and little magazines that people would make and talk about different issues or about their own scenes that they were part of. And so I was more determined than ever to become part of it. [00:19:53] Speaker B: But remember, Chris was a college student at BYU in Utah. Not exactly a punk rock mecca. Or was it? [00:20:05] Speaker A: So I'm in Provo, Utah, and I'm walking down the street one day, and I see a flyer posted up that says, food not bombs. Getting started up here in Provo. [00:20:16] Speaker B: Okay. [00:20:16] Speaker A: You know, and there's a phone number with a little Thing? [00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, little pull tag. Yeah. [00:20:20] Speaker A: So I'm like, what? [00:20:22] Speaker B: Food Not Bombs is a loose collective founded in 1980 by anti nuclear war activist Keith McHenry. From the beginning, it's been closely associated with local punk rock music scene. [00:20:35] Speaker A: And I was like, what? How could that be that it's happening right here in Provo? So I grabbed the number and I called and they're like, hey, yeah, we're having our first meeting. You should come. [00:20:45] Speaker B: This is exactly what Chris was looking for. A group of people who were ready to make a difference and start building a sense of community around their shared ideals. [00:20:56] Speaker A: The punk community is a place where people who are different can be. Feel safe, you know, they can feel accepted. It's a pretty radical acceptance type of a place to be. [00:21:09] Speaker B: But beyond that sense of acceptance and belonging, punk communities tend to be highly attuned to social issues. And that's typically reflected in the music and the shows. [00:21:21] Speaker A: Some of these bands were, you know, very outspoken and vocal about different issues. Animal rights, feminism, you know, homophobia and anti trans. Stuff like this was, you know, mid-90s to mid-2000s. And yeah, I really appreciated that. I as, you know, someone who is still like a practicing Mormon, I was still going to church every Sunday. I could still be part of this community and be accepted. [00:21:50] Speaker B: But maybe more than anything was the sense that everyone was dedicated to a very different way of life. [00:21:58] Speaker A: But yeah, I was seeing people who had lived very different lives and choosing to live a very different life outside of the normal, you know, way of, like, you do this, you get a job, you work, you know, and then you, you know, it's like, no, they're like doing stuff like they're. And they found ways to make art, to make music, to show up for police brutality protests. There was a lot of cool things that were happening. [00:22:23] Speaker B: This is exactly what Chris longed for. He jumped in with both feet. [00:22:28] Speaker A: And so we just started meeting regularly, like once a week, started figuring out ways to get some food to start. And then from then on, we would cook a meal every week and then go to a park and serve it. [00:22:44] Speaker B: And just like that, a punk scene was forming in Provo, Utah. It was at that meeting of the Young Provo chapter of Food Not Bombs that Chris first met Tarek. [00:23:01] Speaker A: Tarek was, and probably still is, an incredible organizer. And he. I don't know how, he was always tapping into all these different groups in the community and like going up to Salt Lake and making connections up there. And like, he would sign us up for stuff. He would just Be like, oh, you're having a protest for the inauguration of George Bush. Okay, we'll be there. We'll provide breakfast. And, you know, he comes back and tells us, and we're just like, what? How are we gonna provide breakfast? You know, like that kind of thing. Right. [00:23:28] Speaker B: One of the first events they organized was a food drive benefit concert. [00:23:32] Speaker A: By this point, I had started a little band, and my friend Tarek was in a band, and we had. We invited some other bands to come to our friend's house. So anyway, in Provo, Utah, we. We were organizing this benefit. You know, basically, we just hoped that some people would come and bring, like, a can of food with them. [00:23:52] Speaker B: Now, this was not a big event. It was a house show. [00:23:56] Speaker A: TV party tonight. TV party tonight. [00:24:00] Speaker B: Chris and Tarek figured they should probably clear it with the neighbors. [00:24:04] Speaker A: This was going to be in the middle of the day. We talked to all the neighbors. Everyone was cool. There were no issues. But we saw cops setting up around the block. [00:24:14] Speaker B: Despite this ominous sign, they went ahead with the concert, confident they'd covered all their bases with their neighbors. [00:24:20] Speaker A: So we're all inside, you know. You know, we have all these kids that end up showing up, bringing food. It's great. People are donating some money. People are donating food. We're able to really start getting off the ground. And, you know, despite all the cops. We had seen all the cops around, but we're like, no one's going to complain. I don't think we'll have any issues. Eventually, there were enough cars that started coming by. One car was parked a little over the sidewalk. [00:24:46] Speaker B: That's when the trouble started. [00:24:48] Speaker A: So that was all the cops needed to come over. And of course, they insisted on writing the ticket. And so, you know, Caleb is documenting this, taking photos. The cop really takes offense to him having a photograph taken of himself. So he starts yelling at Caleb and screaming at him. And my friend Tarek says, hey, it's not against the law to take pictures of fascists. As soon as he said that, as soon as he said that, the police threw him to the ground. [00:25:23] Speaker B: The situation quickly escalated from there. [00:25:25] Speaker A: We're just screaming at the cops, you know, to. To let him go and stuff. And they ended up hauling him to jail and charging him with, I forget what, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, of all things. Well, while he's on the ground yelling, I am not resisting arrest. I am not resisting arrest. [00:25:42] Speaker D: I think I probably got a little bit of a disrespectful attitude getting sucked into this thing. [00:25:48] Speaker B: This is Tarek these days? He's a lecturer in the history of psychology at Yale University. [00:25:54] Speaker D: Chris was really an important figure in that scene. At one point we, like, leased or rented some, like, old warehouse. We kind of built like a. Made like a radical library in there, and we'd have, like, art shows and punk shows and stuff like that. [00:26:14] Speaker B: Like, Chris Tarek remembers the deep sense of commitment this little group of punk kids had for helping other people. [00:26:22] Speaker D: You know, all the great music and art and everything like that that folks were doing and all the kind of service work that folks were doing, you know, they were really, you know, even some of the scariest looking punk kids were in the sense of being a Christian as meaning, you know, that you're, you know, doing onto the least of these, like some of these scary kids, some of them were, you know, atheists and stuff. But, like, in terms of their behavior, they were some of the most Christian people around in terms of the kinds of activity that they were involved in. [00:26:55] Speaker B: Hearing both Chris and Tarek describe this time in their lives, I think it's hard not to see the appeal. The punk scene knits together a patchwork of marginalized and disaffected people who are determined to freely express themselves. The whole thing is stitched together by a kind of DIY ethic that rejects consumer exploitation. Fast forward to 2003, and Chris is now living in Greensboro, North Carolina, getting his master's in library science. It turns out Greensboro was a hotbed of local punks and anarchists at that time. And it wasn't long before Chris was living in a house with a bunch of fellow musicians and misfits. Meanwhile, Tarek had moved to Virginia. They'd occasionally connect, and one day Tarek reached out. [00:27:56] Speaker A: Tarek was going to go to a protest in Miami in 2003. Free Trade Area of the Americas was the big meeting. So Tarek was like, hey, I'm going to be passing through to go to the FDA protest. You want to come? [00:28:12] Speaker B: Chris did, in fact, want to go. FTAA was a gathering of trade ministers from 34 countries who came together to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. According to activists, the FTAA agreement would threaten jobs, erode healthcare and education services, and destroy indigenous rights, all in the name of corporate profits. A major protest was being planned. Chris and Tarek recruited some of their friends and headed to Miami. [00:28:47] Speaker A: And so, yeah, we did different marches, had some musicians playing and stuff, and everything was working out okay. So we're just kind of like hanging around and something happened. We didn't see what exactly happened. And the police just started coming down on everyone. [00:29:03] Speaker B: Thousands of activists turned up in Miami. Individual marches ranged from 13,000 to 17,000 demonstrators. These included union members, students, farm workers, and human rights activists. They were confronted by an unprecedented level of militarized police tactics. [00:29:26] Speaker A: We got kenneled by cops in different times. We were running from cops at different times, and they trapped us in this area. They just came in and just beat everyone up, basically, or threw them into a bus to go take them to jail. So we're just trying to leave, and then eventually they make us go a certain way. They're like, okay, turn this way, turn that way, and there's a big crowd of us. And then they just started taking people and putting them in cuffs. And I was one of those people, and I got put up on a bus and ended up going to jail for a bit. [00:30:00] Speaker B: In law enforcement circles, the highly aggressive tactics used by the Miami Police Department later came to be known as the Miami model. And this was the subject of a 2004 documentary of the same name. In the true spirit of the punk community. That documentary is widely available online for free. [00:30:21] Speaker A: But, yeah, I mean, it was another one of those experiences that just really kind of shaped what I thought about this world and what the people in power were actually all about. [00:30:43] Speaker B: So, I mean, you're like a dad now. You're married, you're a librarian. You live a pretty, like, normal life. How do you. How do you scratch that itch? [00:30:58] Speaker A: I. I would think if I was a young man, looking at what I'm doing now, I would probably think, oh, like, so boring. Like, most tame thing, you know, why aren't you out there in the streets getting arrested and, you know, fighting cops and stuff like that? But, like, the. The work I get to do every day, when I think about it, it's like I. You know, I have this big, beautiful building. [00:31:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:25] Speaker A: With all these resources and staff, you know, who are also interested in the same mission. Right. Of just, like, helping people. [00:31:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:31:34] Speaker A: And we provide that for people. Like, I'm helping, you know, you know, maybe more indirectly at this point, but, like, I'm helping those babies learn early literacy skills. You know, preschoolers who are just, you know, getting ready to start going to school. I'm providing an outlet for seniors who don't maybe have anyone else in their life that they talk to. [00:31:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:57] Speaker A: There's health and fitness classes we do. You know, I channel a lot of energy into making the library a place of, like, radical inclusion. That's basically it. Yeah, I think Tarek was one of those people that kind of put me on that path and exposed me to all these things that if I didn't show up at that meeting, you know, that day for Food not bombs, who knows what, you know, I could have had a very, I guess, more conventional and less interesting life, I'd say. [00:32:59] Speaker B: Thank you, friends, for joining us here at the Collective Table podcast. I hope you enjoyed hearing Chris's story as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you. If so, if you search deep inside your heart and you locate there even the tiniest speck of appreciation for this podcast, would you please do me a big favor and share it? It's so easy to email it, text it, or Instagram it to your friends, family, fellow anarchists, punk rockers But if you really want to go the extra mile, consider leaving us a review on on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you happen to be listening right now. It really helps us get the word out. The Collective Table is created by Jason and Janelle Coker and is a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary Church in Oceanside, California. This podcast is directed, edited, promoted, auto tuned, and obsessed over by Nico Butler. Theme music composed by the very same Nico Butler. From all of us here. May the peace of God be with you. We'll see you next time.