OWS Sets the Conditions for Violence

You just met "Bob" in yesterday's post. Remember, he was finding it boring to help in the medical tent. He had tried sign making too. That was fun but had its limits.  What he really wants to do, is help to propel the movement forward. His favorite activity so far? Blocking the exits at the Defending the American  Dream  Summit at the DC Convention Center on Friday evening, November 4, 2011. This was tremendous fun for Bob from the Basement.

Bob and a large number of other DCOWS (that is, occupiers from Occupy DC) arrived about 6 PM and they blocked all eight of the building exits.  The conference participants were already inside. Many of them had come on busses, from very large distances to attend the Americans for Prosperity event. Some had been travelling through the middle of the night and had not yet any rest of any kind. The unsuspecting conference participants are inside eating dinner and listening to speakers; the protesters are stacking up outside for three hours, with the goal of being there when the conference ends, so that the conference participants will have a very hard time leaving. I asked Bob why they would want to do that. The goal, he says, was to make the attendees very uncomfortable. Any time you "do an action", he explained, the idea is to make your targets very uncomfortable. I asked, so you wanted to intimidate them? No, no, he answered. They did not want to intimidate anyone. 

Watch some tapes of the exit.  

......at 2:10 of the first clip, you will see a young woman verbally unleashing on the protesters.  She was a  busrider from many hours away who was there with her two children and her gunnery sergeant husband.  When this crowd separated her from her 7-yr-old daughter, Mama Tiger came out. The person pulling her hair was actually her husband who was afraid she was going to get hurt.

I am quoting this paragraph from a person who attended the conference and watched all this unfolding in horror. People got hurt. Ladies fell down the concrete stairs. A woman in a wheelchair was trapped inside the building. 

What was the problem with the Americans for Prosperity conference, I wondered. Bob mumbled about the Koch Brothers and Herman Cain and Mitt Romney all being involved. He grimaced just to mention these names.  I really could not follow what his objection was. It sounded to me like he was saying that he and the others are so ideologically opposed to the conservative message they just don't want anyone to hear it. But when I put it to him that way, he said no, that was not the problem. What then? Was it about destroying the ability of conservatives to raise money? And he said no, that wasn't it either. He was under the impression the dinner tickets only cost 75.00. So it was not an event for high-dollar donors. A broad range of people could attend. 

It is odd that Bob zeroed in on Cain and Romney. They were scheduled to speak at the conference, but not that evening. The night's event was the Ronald Reagan Tribute dinner and the speakers were Judge Andrew Napolitano and Dinesh D'Souza.

I heard more about the Friday night antics when I sat in on Occupy DC's "general assembly" on Monday evening. The people attending seemed so nice and so rational. Over and over again they piped up to remind everyone that they are a  nonviolent movement. Readers: Don't believe it! You can't claim to be nonviolent when you are goading people and chanting at people and blocking people with the stated purpose of making them very uncomfortable. People backed into a corner have to react in some way. When the DCOWS plan these actions, they are creating the conditions which are likely to lead to panic and to a 78 year old lady landing at the bottom of a flight of concrete stairs, as happened here.

As long as OWS plans "actions" intended to trap people, even temporarily, or to make average people very uncomfortable, violence will many times be the result.

But here is an odd twist. We sat in circles after the general assembly. Our directive: to discuss how "we" can stand in solidarity with others protesting across the world. (I put we in quotation marks, because I am only there to observe.) I sat right next to one woman who had been blocking the exits to the Defending the Dream conference. At the exit she was blocking, the evening had turned into actual conversations with TeaPartiers. She joined a few of them for drinks! And she was shocked to find out that OWS has a lot in common with the TeaPartiers. She figured out that TeaPartiers and OWS are worried about the exact same things. HELLO!  And she also had figured out that the difference between OWS and the TeaParty, is in how to solve those problems. Her suggestion to the 16 member circle: reach out to the TeaParty in some way. Mind you, she was absolutely squirming in her seat and taking extra effort to make doubly certain that no one in that circle would ever accuse her of being any kind of a  tea party sympathizer. A fate worse than death in the intolerant atmosphere of a OWS gathering! But three others spoke up to say they absolutely agree with her. There were no down twinkles.

SO. THERE. MAY. BE. SOME. HOPE. IN. THIS. WORLD. Maybe some of the OWS are going to start thinking of the TeaParty as made of thinking beings who have the same concerns and who have better, less fanciful and utopian answers.

During that same General Assembly on Monday evening, the Media Outreach committee reported. The committee had targeted to turn the bad news reporting about their "action" on Friday evening into good news reporting and they had succeeded. Some of the protesters had blocked the streets. As a result a car had collided with a few of  those protesters. They read aloud the  AP news report read from Friday night. I can't find the AP report, but Reuters was similar to what was read aloud at the GA. And by Sunday, the story was markedly different, and more favorable to the OWS. The OWS committee believes it was their outreach which changed that news reporting.

We heard from the Street Team Support Training committee. They are planning to go right on doing more actions and blocking more streets and interfering with just about anything they can think of in the DC area. So they are creating a support structure to monitor the situation closely and figure out who gets taken to jail, and where they are taken. That way, they can go and start the legal proceedings to get them out of jail again. (Support for anticipated arrest is planned in advance--another clue that this is not a peaceful movement.)

The committee spokesperson stood up at the General Assembly and said that he recommends that the OWS choose to block only two lanes in future protests. Why? Because blocking the entire street makes the public mad. He has been hearing that motorists are getting angry and frustrated when they are stuck and can't use the streets. He is afraid that by blocking the entire street, they will "start to lose the 99 percent". But did the OWS ever "have" the 99% in the first place?  Doubtful. Americans are not big fans of barbarians and  mob rule. 

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Unrepresentative and Fluid Samples at Occupy Protests

I met "Bob" at Occupy DC and he gave me a rundown of the racial makeup of both the city and the occupation. He's not a camper.  He's got a job at a market in the area and he lives in his mom's basement. That's a pretty happy situation for him so he's not going to be sleeping in any tent in McPherson Square.  But he does come by whenever he can. One day he worked eight hours in the medical tent. Pretty boring, he said. Most of the time you do nothing. And then you help someone with a scrape or something.  Dullsville.  He doesn't want to waste his time in the medical tent again.

We talked for a long time. As always, I was trying to figure out what the people at Occupy want. Bob seemed to think they are simply unhappy with a number of things. Like bank bailouts. He is totally against bailing out the banks. I told Bob he was sounding like a conservative on that issue! But he pointed out that while it has recently (really?) become fashionable for conservatives to say they are against bailouts, that the progressives have always (really?) been against  bailing out banks. For all time.

In addition to who wants crony capitalism for financial institutions, Bob and I  disagreed on other issues facts too. I had just attended the nightly general assembly. We counted off into three groups. My group had sixteen people in it.  So I figured there were some 48 to 50 people attending the general assembly that evening. I specifically counted minority participation. Back when I was reading coverage of the TeaParties, it was clear that one of the major goals of journalism was to count blacks in attendance at any protest. I figured since I want to be a good journalist, I had better get counting!  There were four black men and one black woman attending the General Assembly. There were no people appearing to be Hispanic, and none appearing to be Chinese or Japanese or Thai, but there was one Indian gentleman in my group. So that makes 48 to 50 people total. Five blacks, one Asian. Ten percent black. About ten percent "people of color".

When Bob suggested to me that DC itself it just about all black,  I told him of my count and said this DC Occupy movement crowd was a pretty unrepresentative sample of the city the protest is occupying. But he told me I was wrong. You'd be surprised, he said. Thirty percent of the people at Occupy DC are black. So in his opinion,  Occupy DC is a very good representation.  I don't know how he got that figure. I had counted, and he did not care. He preferred to use his "estimate". He did mention that part of the problem, is that you can't always tell what race someone is. That is certainly true, but he had also told me that he had attended racial sensitivity training and that this had changed his life.  So on the one hand, he is saying race is such an obvious thing, that it can put people at a disadvantage. And on the other hand, he is saying that race is not always so obvious that people are actually aware of it. Which leads to the question, how can you oppress someone for being of a different race from you, if you don't even know they are of a different race?

Recent figures show that DC is about 50% black. So even if Bob's estimate was correct, the black makeup of the Occupy DC crowd would have to be 66% higher to approximate a reflection of the actual population of the city. With my count, the crowd would have to have five times as many black participating.

But consider this. Occupiers don't stay put! As I roamed the grounds, I kept doing a double take, because one of these guys on the site looked so familiar. Turns out I had met and had spoken to the same guy two weeks ago in Boston! I met multiple people who had been staying at more than one occupation. These people clearly move from one protest to the other very fluidly.  The man from Boston has been "occupying" for weeks. Between Boston and DC, he had spent a week at Zuccotti Park.  Next he will be moving south and will go to Tennessee for awhile......and at the new year, he plans to be occupying in Tampa/St Pete. This, he wanted me to know, is because they have put out the call. They desperately need people down there at the Tampa occupation. Call me nuts, but I have my suspicions that perhaps he just wants to be in Florida in January*. A facilitator I spoke with,  had just arrived from Zuccotti Park. She had quit her job in order "occupy" at the start of the movement, and now was camping and sharing her knowledge in DC. An anarchist I chatted with had been occupying Philadelphia, before arriving in DC.  So I met a bunch of campers who were not DC area residents. And I met a bunch of DC residents who were not campers. And Occupy DC is almost all white. (Except for the very large number of homeless people who hang out there because there is free hot food and because with all the activity, they feel safer than ever.)

And except for the people Jesse Jackson brings in when he sweeps through with his entourage. Sometimes the news seems to say that some of these movements are growing. But now I know that you can't tell if a particular occupation is attracting newcomers, or if a vanload of people from another occupation has just arrived. And I question just how representative Occupy DC is.

* Spoiler Alert: Don't be surprised as we go into the cold days of winter and snow,  if we see the occupations down south swelling, and the northern ones getting smaller.


Unless otherwise stated, all photos All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2011 by the author of this blog. Use with permission only.

What is Victory?

Today I occupied Occupy DC for a little while, but I am not a whole lot closer to knowing what the movement really hopes to gain. The effort seems to mean entirely different things to different people. I sat in on the General Assembly which began just after 6 PM on November 7,  in McPherson Square.  Serving as co-facilitator with a young lady named Heather, a gentleman by the name of Sam let us know that tonight's was the 35th General Assembly meeting of the occupation. Translation: people and their leashed cats have been living in the tents on that square for 35 days now.

Through a show of hands it was discovered that quite a few of the 40-60 people in attendance had never participated before in consensus building discussion.  So we got a briefing in the rules and the signals. Followers of this blog will know that up twinkles means agreement, and down twinkles doesn't. You can also cross your arms across your chest, but not tonight. A block is not ever used during general discussion. Apparently.

First up: we were to turn to our neighbor and discuss "what victory looks like". In other words, how will Occupy Wall Street know when the goal has been achieved, so they can stop occupying?  I of course would have no answer for that, but a sweet young man named Austin sitting next to me in the dark wanted to talk. So we did.

General Assembly at Occupy DC

This was Austin's first time at the occupation. He described himself as a "young professional" working with progressive causes. He develops online strategies for progressive non-profits, through a consulting firm. I am not sure which organizations he consults for, but when it is time to bring out a huge number of people for a progressive protest, Austin may be in the background, orchestrating some of that. He did not really know what he thought victory would look like though.  He only came because his friends thought it would be cool to check it out. Some of the people who did have ideas about victory, however, shared their ideas with the entire group. One man rambled and rambled, and ended up saying that victory would be achieved with debt reduction, and when we "lift people up and help them". Other people I had spoken to throughout the evening had entirely different ideas ranging from reaching a state of universal health care, to living in anarchy, which is a system with no hierarchy. 

Behind me, a vocal man had a crystal clear idea of what he is looking for; he shouted it out with gusto. Victory looks like "flipping the system on its ass." And from the crowd? No groans. No complaints. No down twinkles.

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