By Sue Carlton, Times columnist
Friday, January 6, 2012
What motivates a man — an engineer, even — to rise from his warm bed before dawn, head out into the chill, set up a camp stove and cook oatmeal for a bunch of protesters?
I pose this question to Jim Shirk, civil and environmental engineer, as we shiver in a downtown parking lot with sunrise streaking the Tampa sky. He is busy shaking not-instant oats into a pot, adding a stick of real butter and a healthy pour of half-and-half.
Like Occupy Wall Street that inspired it, Occupy Tampa, here in waxing and waning numbers since the fall, has been similarly pegged as a well-meaning if critically unfocused voice against corporate and political greed. Shirk, a man whose own strong opinions on, say, the flaws he sees in his current governor are stated clearly on the bumper of his Prius, describes Occupiers this way:
"They're the desperate," he says. "You see these kids way behind the eight-ball in student debt, victims of a system they didn't create. They've been told work hard, go to school, get a job and — whoops, sorry, just goofing on you."
At the edge of Curtis Hixon Park, sleepy protesters and a good number of homeless welcome Shirk and his steaming pot like they have fallen from heaven. "Morning, Jim," they say, "How was your vacation?" They cradle their bowls to warm hands and heap on brown sugar and raisins Shirk lays out like a good host. "The ideal Occupier chow," he calls it: cheap, hot and filling.
This park was prime real estate for waving signs at busy Ashley Street that said "The System Is Broken!" and "Are You Angry?" and for drivers responding with approving honks or the unintentionally ironic: "Get a job!" The park was less ideal for sticking it out overnight to make the point, to truly "occupy."
"I'm 47," protester John Talbot told me, "but this concrete's starting to make me feel 90."
Then there was the daily dance with police, the routine arrests for trespassing in the park after hours, the morning wake-up roustings on the sidewalk.
Once I was at the stoplight as Occupiers yawned and stretched awake while officers looked on, reminding me of that old cartoon with the wolf and the sheepdog punching a time clock to come to work ("Mornin', Sam." "Mornin' Ralph") before beginning their day of work as Official Adversaries.
So the dance (and the arrests) got old, and naturally it was Tampa's strip club and counter-culture king Joe Redner saving the day by letting the protest live on in a modest West Tampa park he owns. It's no thoroughfare like before, but there are tents, blessed tents.
Regardless of your politics, all of this starts to feel less like a sleepy Southern town and more like a city where people care enough to say something, even if they don't say it as clearly as we might like, where police and citizens react, and where there is a Jim Shirk making sure there is something warm to eat.
Ladling oatmeal at the new and quieter digs, Shirk sounds like he misses the discipline of daily cops. Last weekend he showed up at 9 a.m., and nearly everyone was still asleep.
So he is weaning them, showing them the stove, leaving supplies so they can sustain themselves. It's time, he says. Then someone reports the Occupy coffee maker broke, and Shirk is already talking about a nearby thrift store where he can get a new one, cheap.