A few weeks back I wrote that I thought #OWS had gotten all they could out of the camping-as-activism idea. I think the events of the past month have shown that to be correct. Krist Novoselic, formerly the bassist for Nirvana, made the same point on the Alyona Show (video below). At some point, your movement has to get beyond battling with local municipalities and the police and start, you know, doing something.
I’m don’t know the full extent of Novoselic’s political work, he seems too devoted to the idea of ”democracy”, but I think he’s correct with respect to the limits of occupying as means of creating political change.
Whatever you think of the Occupy protesters, there is no excuse for this:
When terrorists employ this sort of tactic, attacking someone when they try to aid an injured person, we rightfully decry their inhumanity. Why do we excuse it when done by police? There has been very little violence from any of the protesters, so why do city officials insist on deploying heavily armed personnel to attack them?
Yesterday, I posted a pretty optimistic appraisal of the Occupy Wall Street protests and it is still my hope that the movement can have a positive effect on the United States.
It is a half hour of footage from Oct. 15 in Denver and shows a tense standoff between protesters and police. Now, conflict like this between protesters and police is nothing new, and this incident wasn’t particularly bad. It does highlight, however, the problem with protests of this sort.
Confrontation with the police is nearly inevitable when a large group of protesters move in to, shall we say occupy, a public space. Many activists seem to feel that it is their duty to confront police or to get arrested. Governments add unneeded fuel to the fire by using heavily armed paramilitary personnel when attempting to contain or disband protests. It’s a recipe for conflict, but is it the way to create change? Occupy Wall Street claims the protests in Egypt and Tunisia, among others, as a source of inspiration. Those movements were successful in removing from power oppressive regimes. Does that mean the same methods will work in America?
I’m doubtful.
Civil disobedience as a means of shining a light on injustice can be highly effective, as history has shown. However, when conflict with the police is the primary means of expression, the movement is easily marginalized and the message, no matter how noble or prescient, is lost in a cloud of tear gas. This is especially true when, as in the video above, the conflict is over an ancillary issue like the use of public land. The Occupy movement may not have issued a formal declaration of beliefs or demands, but certainly they’re concerned with larger issues than that. Why allow your movement to be defined so narrowly?
The 23 protesters who entered a branch of Citi Bank, ostensibly to close their accounts, is a better example of effective civil disobedience. At least it relates to the larger issue. If true that some of the activists were wearing masks, well that was pretty dumb.
The Occupy movement has been very adept at using technology to organize and facilitate large gatherings of people, certainly they can use those skills to advance their cause while minimizing unnecessary conflict with the police. The movement was conceived and born using all the tools of the digital age, only to revert to 20th century methods of political activism.
The movement is still in its infancy and is still fueled primarily by anger so, at this stage, the need to scream and shout and raise a little hell is understandable. To move beyond infancy will require more. I don’t know that the Tea Party ever got past that stage and their effectiveness was limited as a result. If there is any hope of ending the cabal of government and the monetary elite, it is going to require ingenuity and novel approaches to activism. Not slogans shouted through a bullhorn, but honest efforts at persuasion. Let’s see what happens in month two.
The Occupy Wall Street protest has been ongoing for a month now and I’m still trying to get a handle on it. Here are some random thoughts.
Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
There’s much in common between these two movements, though they are commonly painted asopposites. The general thrust of their anger is the recognition that the system is broken, that those that have been given power have used it for personal gain. The government bailouts of political connected companies were a flagrant slap in the face to the majority of Americans from across the ideological spectrum who opposed them.
While the Tea Party focused on the government side of the crony capitalism coin, the Occupiers have focused on the corporations. Both have been maligned by the press who love to focus on the outlandish fringe.
Since the Occupy movement has yet to announce any formal positions, it’s difficult to make an honest judgement on how realistic any forthcoming proposal might be. Though I must say, the ideas that have floated up out of the sea of sparkle fingers, such as eliminating all debt or maximum salaries aren’t encouraging.
The Protesters
If you watch enough footage and interviews from the protests, you will see some amazing things. The complexity of the tiny society that has sprung up in Zucotti Park is simply incredible. Even the decision making process, an easy target for ridicule, is in it’s own way admirable if for no other reason than they’ve managed to get hundreds of opinionated young people to abide by it.
This video filmed by the American Enterprise Institute gives you a good look at what I’m talking about.
The Police
While recognizing that the shaky videos filmed under chaotic conditions mostly by the protesters (or those sympathetic to them) are not necessarily giving us a complete picture of the actions of the NYPD, what they do show is damning. There is far too much violence from the police for what has thus far been a fairly passive protest.
Looking ahead
I hope that the protesters realize that their audience is not Barack Obama, it is not Congress, it is the American people. A thousand or even ten thousand people in the streets is an impressive visual, but it will not mean a thing if they are unable to win over a large percentage of Americans. They need to be aware of how they are being perceived and counfound the agenda driven dismissals of the MSM.
I expect that when Occupy WallStreet announces their one demand, or whatever comes out of this, I won’t agree with much of it, but I hold out hope that I’m wrong. Regardless, like the Tea Party, the Occupy movement is good for America. We have been complacent too long. A real debate over the direction we are heading, our problems and their possible solutions is long overdue.
Yesterday afternoon, I decided to stop by at the OccupyLancaster site in Lancaster, PA to see for myself what was happening. To begin with, I recognize that Lancaster is a small city and that it’s dangerous to draw conclusions of the worldwide Occupy movement from what I saw there. However, most of the themes that we’ve seen from OccupyWallStreet and other cities were present at Art Park in Lancaster yesterday.
There was a march earlier in the day with a larger crowd than the 50 or so that I found in the late afternoon. There were a dozen or so protesters holding signs up to cars passing by on Prince St, two guys banging on drums, a girl with a hula hoop, and a guy conscientiously walking around picking up trash and cigarette butts. The general atmosphere was what you would find on a fall afternoon on a college campus. I stood around for 25 minutes or so, took a brief video with my phone to capture the scene (posted below), gave a guy directions who was trying to remember where he parked, and I left. No one ever approached me, or spoke to me. I’m not very adept at walking up to strangers and starting conversations, so I didn’t initiate any interactions either.
As I was driving home, I began to think about the movement and what they appear to stand for, of course it is all very nebulous right now. Corporations appear to be the main villian, and two of the more common complaints from the protesters are about corporate bailouts along with corporate personhood and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in short crony capitalism. This angle is the movement’s best tool for mass appeal. Across the political spectrum, the American public despise the bailouts and the corruption of politics. What the Occupiers (is that what we’re calling them?) fail to understand is that the evil at the root of these problems is government. We have allowed government to accumulate an astonishing amount of power, and that power creates the current environment of corruption, it is not a solution for it. It is self-defeating to argue for less corporate influence in politics while simultaneously advocating more regulatory power for the federal government.
Like the Tea Party, it looks like the Occupy movement has legitimate grievances shared by many Americans, but they haven’t yet developed any practical proposals to address those grievances. Until they recognize the real cause of the corruption, they won’t have a prayer of effecting the kind of change they seek.
