RJ doesn’t do a lick of work and I love him for it.
I’m serious. Anyone who’s worked with RJ will tell you, very carefully, very diplomatically, that he is… not exactly what you’d call motivated by physical labor. Never was. I have a strong suspicion that even when he was young this was just fundamentally true about the man. And somehow it doesn’t matter. Because that’s not the part of RJ that matters.
But let me back up.
RJ is one of those guys. You know the type — except you probably don’t, because there aren’t that many of them. Nice doesn’t cover it. Warm doesn’t cover it. The man walks into a room and something shifts. Conversations open up. People relax. And if you are unfortunate enough — or fortunate enough, depending on how you look at it — to shake his hand or God forbid hug him, you will offer up your wallet, your loyalty, and possibly your dignity. Some people have lost all three. I am not exaggerating even a little.
To be clear: RJ is an honorable, happily married man. He’s not taking anything. That’s just how people act around him. That’s the phenomenon.
It helps that RJ is no choirboy. There’s some miles on him. The kind of stories I’m not going to tell here and he wouldn’t want me to. Saints put people on edge. RJ puts people at ease, because you can tell he’s lived a little and isn’t about to get squeamish about however you’ve lived.
But here’s where I need you to slow down and not miss what I’m actually saying.
Every time I’ve run into RJ outside of work — every single time — he was downtown. Not at a restaurant. Not at a bar. On a sidewalk somewhere, table set up, crock pot plugged in, serving food to people who needed it. No permit. No nonprofit letterhead. No Instagram for the algorithm. Just RJ and a line of people who hadn’t eaten.
He has been to jail for it.
Going to jail doesn’t worry RJ much. What worries him is who’s feeding those people while he’s gone.
That’s the whole man right there. That’s it.
Now sit with that for a second, because there’s something in it most people will skip right past.
RJ is not running a program. There’s no nonprofit. There’s no board meeting. Nobody pitched a deck. Nobody aligned anything with anybody’s strategic priorities. RJ has a crock pot. He fills it. He plugs it in. He feeds people. Seeing the problem and doing something about it are the same motion for him. There’s no daylight in between and there’s no permission slip in between either.
That’s an old idea and it’s got a name. The name is direct action. The idea is simple enough that a kid could grasp it and most adults have somehow lost track of it. You see a thing that needs doing. You do the thing. You don’t write a letter about the thing. You don’t form a committee to look into the thing. You don’t wait for the thing to be approved, branded, scheduled, or funded. You do it, and if it turns out the thing was technically illegal, you find that out the way RJ found it out.
Most of what gets called civic engagement around here is the opposite of that. It’s asking permission with extra steps. We’re trained from the time we’re little to believe the right way to deal with a problem is to find the right authority, fill out the right paperwork, and wait your turn. And we’re trained to keep believing this even when the problem is that somebody twenty feet away from us hasn’t eaten in two days.
RJ either skipped that lesson or sat through it and ignored it. Either way, you get the same outcome. The outcome is a guy with a crock pot on a sidewalk and a line of fed people in front of him.
Let me be honest about what the city is doing when they put cuffs on him.
The city is not protecting anybody’s health. The food’s fine. The city is not protecting the hungry, who would, on the whole, rather be fed. The city is protecting how things look. It would rather the hungry stay hungry somewhere out of sight than be fed somewhere in plain view. The ordinance isn’t about food safety. It’s about keeping the problem off the postcard. RJ drags the problem onto the postcard by feeding it downtown. That’s the real offense. The food is just the excuse.
And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. And then you’ve got a decision to make about what you’re going to do about it.
Most of us decide to do nothing, and we tell ourselves a story about why. The story usually involves the law, or our families, or our jobs, or the importance of working within the system. Those aren’t bad stories. Some of them are even partly true. But they’re the stories we tell to explain why the hungry guy stayed hungry while we walked on by, and sooner or later a person with a conscience has to notice he’s been telling that story for an awful long time.
RJ doesn’t tell that story. RJ has a crock pot.
That’s what I mean by direct action, and that’s why “be more like RJ” is not a bumper sticker. It’s a specific instruction. Find the thing right in front of you that needs doing. Notice whether you’ve been waiting for permission to do it. Notice who exactly you’ve been waiting on. Notice whether they’re coming. And then go ahead and do it, and let the ordinance and the permit office and the regional coalition figure themselves out behind you.
Streets get quieter when bellies are full. That’s not sentiment, that’s just watching. The cities that make sidewalk feeding a crime know this perfectly well — that’s why they make it a crime. A fed population is harder to move along, harder to disappear, harder to pretend isn’t there. RJ, working by himself with a slow cooker and a folding table, is doing more for public order than the people arresting him have done in their whole careers. He’s not waiting for them to catch up. He’s not going to.
I’m not going to pretend I’m at RJ’s level. I write things and push a broom and try to keep a small set of projects pointed in roughly the right direction. But I’ve watched RJ across a parking lot, plugging in that crock pot, and I’ve understood very clearly that I’m being shown how it’s done.
Be more like RJ.
I’m gonna try.
