One of my all-time favorite people and one of the people whose example I continually return to in my thoughts – a saint indeed. He came up in a conversation with a friend about Occupy Wall Street, so I post this fine little obituary. I thought I had posted it before at some point, but it appears I never have. His basic philosophy was 1) we should have a sustainable world economy and 2) we should live on equal shares of it. He did some math and came up with the “World Equity Budget,” which rather terrifyingly would have us all living on something south of $200 per month. I specifically went looking for him, and met him in Eugene, after seeing him featured as the happiest man Angus Deayton found in his BBC series In Search of Happiness. And he was a happy man, because he lived the ideal that was inside of him – a perfect example of incarnation. It’s not enough to know what’s right, you have to live it.
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I think most of the time, people are just born with their dispositions, and they stay the same and don’t correlate to anything, really.
Looks like the link to Charles’ obit is broken; here’s a link to the piece the Eugene alt-weekly did on him after his death.
http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2006/07/13/coverstory.html
I said my goodbye to Charles right before he was interviewed for this piece. His partner had asked me to come over to help move some furniture around (his bed had been moved to the living room, and he was confined to it by then); he introduced the reporter to me so I understood we just had a few moments to exchange pleasantries. He had a-hold of my hands as he thanked me for something (moving furniture, being a good dad, the activism we had engaged in together for many years: I can’t remember now), and I told him “Well, I gotta go–I’m sure I’ll see you again soon”, and he didn’t let go, and with a wry smile looked me straight in the eye, and said “goodbye, Scott”. I said goodbye too, and walked outside, and cried. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was preparing to stop seeing people other than family, and would soon stop eating: his last fast. Getting teary-eyed now just thinking about it. I still miss him.