Thank you NewJK for including me through your story. I empathize with your points about the gap between the purpose of the movement which was outlined in a handout I received the first time I attended which read "There has been media criticism concerning the leaderless nature of the movement, claiming that we do not have a focused goal....the movement is about educating the public on issues
threatening democracy..." And it is people just like us, not just pliticians and big banks, who have the power to threaten this experiment in democracy. When experimenting you cannot be attached to the outcomes you encounter or the experiment is over.
In the handout, the word "democracy" is capitalized (to make it important as we often do in English language). But this kind of inscribing of ideas is what leads to status quo thinking. The kind of democracy that inspires me is when the GA (whether experienced live or on livestream) is working well. It works well when everybody's voice matters not the ones who stay over night. WE are all leaders and none of us leaders over one another. I write in hopes of complementing the brilliance already stated by newjk, green, sockmonkeyhat, and particularly benoverton. I alsow want to address Eva Occupy directly in the interest of questioning your thinking (not you). We are not our thoughts. But we and our egos are conditioned to think we are. I want to challenge my own as well as others thinking to "agree to be offended and stay connected" in ways that are not familiar to your past.
When Eva Occupy speaks of solidarity, I ran to my dictionary. "Solidarity" is defined in Merriam-Webster's as "Unity or agreement of feeling or action, esp. among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group" The OCcupy movement cannot match and may even rival the solidarity expressed in the civil rights movt or Haight Asbury or even the immediate moments after 9-11. This is not about "individuals with a common interest". In fact, what I love about the Occupy movement in Nashville is that it is more like "individuals with uncommon and diverse interests, who claim and work on things that matter to them where they live and occupy life. ON and all the occupy movements have intuitively created a structure that allows all diverse interests to exist together. We are in solidarity about each and every one pursuing what matters most--together!! That includes pursuing inter-faith or religious concerns acffecting even one of the 99% lives rather than thwarting and dismissing it. What if parts of all we bring are the solution to the massive injustice in our lives and in our mutilple worlds? We cannot see each other's lives well from the few moments we share at the plaza.
So I want to be genuinely compassionate AND transparently honest here. My experience in ON resonates with both
newjk and esp.
Green as a person of color and as a person whose been on the front lines of many activist projects since grad school 20 years ago.
I am not taking a leave of absense from ON but I sympathize with newjk. Our participation, my husband and I and sometimes our daughter, is not as often as we cld imagine but we bring our best to participating given our complicated lives (we are going thru bankruptcy, big concerns about our income vs more expenses, and we are newlyweds with a wonderfully dynamic daughter who keeps up occupied at home when we are not occupying the plaza). We come because ON matters in our lives and we hope we bring something that makes a difference for others.
We are not in "solidarity" about everyone but that is not why we are there. Speaking for myself, I am there to listen to who this community really is for ourselves and others. But here are our personal concerns. I care about empowering students in higher ed to be great citizens and great human beings as part of their creative learning process designed for what matters to them. Jim my husband cares about people expressing their faith for the lowest 10% and that people who were outcast by organized religions can find and discover God without the 1% defining what a church, synongogue or mosque is.
In contrast, I was not in solidarity with the CCA direct action slave auction thing no matter how well it was done according to one or two Occupiers whose history is not touched by the grotesqueness of the transatlantic slave trade that is America's holocaust. All societies had slaves. One Western society used slavery to build capitalism upon forcing over 10 million people to migrate into generations of free and forced labor. Even Muslims who enslaved people in their history set them free after a generation or if they accepted Islam. Enacting a slave auction in majority white settings simply means something bitterly disempowering {worthy of a "block"} for most people of African descent in the US, Canada and Brazil.
I can admit here that I have not seen via video and I was not there (could not be). I was only there when it was being planned and perhaps what I need to be responsible for is that I had some personal issues as a newcomer that had me NOT say what was there for me BEFORE the direct action took place. This is what newcomers, esp. disenfranchised newcomers, diabled folks, POC (ppl of color) and immigrants, hell and poor whites, often experience when dissent is not invited and welcomed from them by the majority of a working group.
My silence had more to do with figuring out if I really had a say and feeling disempowered about my life that day. A part of being a member of this effed up nation that we rarely discuss at ON is that some, maybe even many, ppl are coming to ON because there is no place else they are truly heard and no place else anyone truly listens to themselves and others' pain or suffering. They dont need fixing. They need to be gotten. Citizens everywhere are not listened to anywhere else. Being heard rather than doing something about it (making a proposal) can be the most TRANSFORMATIVE act we could perform, a direct action from person to person at the level of group, that could aid a true democracy that has ppl live their daily ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. And thank you newjk for doing that for me as a person of color in front of the Homeland Security bldg (how ironic) at that Friday night GA in the bitter cold. Having a say and learning to say it even if it needs tweaking lets us know we (you and/or I) matter.
Pardon my longwindedness. I am a professor. LOL
There is something I think we could explore as a community of occupiers occupying strange and foreign lands (figuratively and literally) relative to how we understand group communication.
I learned this paradigm almost 5 years ago, and I still use it day-to-day. Imagine there are three categories of conversations that you, I and we hear. Conversations in certain settings and events have already existing patterns we were born into. We are conditioned to think, say and act certain ways before we know it. The upsets expressed above, all could stem from something you learned at a very young age about what solidarity and working together means or you could have learned it from when things were NOT working (which often leads to learning how not to cooperate in reverse if that makes any sense).
What if y/our view of non-violence or even of religion (pick any topic) could be categorized within a discourse? Which category are you ordinarily voicing at ON or listening from? This paradigm is about patterned ways of thinking, listening, speaking, feeling and acting around what should or shouldn't be in a community or setting of folks (i.e. we call all this in shorthand a "discourse" - a discourse of patterned behaviors or the status quo).
Occupy Nashville has it's own discourse like the talk and speaking around the GA or around playing basketball or knitting has its own discourse associated with a community or even a place or event. Discourses are what has us think things should go a certain way or not in different settings. So consider there are three categories we occupy in each setting that keeps the status quo patterns in place.
Category 1 - already known, the familiar, the expected, something commonly said or heard, might even be a predictable or cliche in phrasing. What we expect out of GAs individually and/or collectively is an example.
Category 2 - is the "unsaid but communicated"--whenever something is said by someone (past or present), other communication is carried along with it such as "assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentments, regrets, interpretations, significance, and issues that occur as dangerous....No matter how smart or insightful people [yes, reader, you and I are the smart ones here], we are prone to being hijacked by the unsaid especially the unsaid about which people are unaware" (Logan and Zaffron 2009, 37). So if you don't share your fears, they can get in the way through nonverbal communication (wrinkling your nose whle someone is speaking rather than doing "on the fence" or "don't like" hand signals which could live for most of us in Category 1 at ON. These categories are not real or fact. Just a way of looking at a setting or community of folks.)
Category 3 - is that which is never heard or has never been said before (by you or in your presence for you; others may have different experience of this); it could occur as out-of-left field, it could occur as poetic or crazy, it often occurs as completely new (good or bad) or sometimes as if gibberish. Thus, this category could occur as threatening to those who dwell mostly in Category 1 --the familiar and expected. Most of us do not dwell in this category which leads to the status quo.
Exploring these three fields in a nonlinear way or learning to play in Category 3 more and more is where transformation (not change) of self and community can occur in a discourse but people have so little training in this realm they tend to revert to the familiar (category 1) to play if safe. (read my blog about difference between change and transformation if it's category 2 or 3 for you [http://kyraocity.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/distinguishing-change-from-transformation/].
I have been aware of nonverbal expressions of distaste when people have shared what matters to them. People who are inherently part of the 99% who came freely to join the Occupy Nashville movement and contribute their greatness for not just ON per se but to our larger and personal communities. Rolling your eyes (category 2) when ppl are sharing their concerns, interrupting them, and thwarting peoples intentions may not occur to some as disingenous to our Occupy principles and values but they are. Your actions are speaking louder than your ideals in that case.
It would REALLY make a difference if we each would simply share our fears rather than thwart other ppl you imagine represent them (you could be wrong about them, too). Generalizing and stereotyping from afar (as we all do, I know I have at the GA) doesn't work in such a complex gathering of folks who are keen observers of Category 2 in others. Eva Occupy, I am sorry if I did this to you when you led the GA. I wasn't thinking or being responsible. But I am sure I did to a degree.
So given my fessing up to that I hope you can hear what I have to offer you around your comment above that "this is not a Christian movement it is a peoples' movement". Why should you listen to me. BEcause I am a human being and deserve that no matter what I did or didn't do in my book. I give you that same right. ANd I offer this as a thing to consider. I am not interested in making you wrong on this.
So consider that the people in this city (and country) are both Christian and everything that is not Christian. I take this from my husband who often says this about those we disagree with ("Rumsfield is everything that is evil and everything that is not"). It takes courage and compassion of a sort that is unheard of to go there but there we go. People who bring their religious or faith concerns to Occupy are that and they are everything that is not that. Once you start fighting against their presence you too become "religious" or zealous about them.
I myself have practiced to be a Buddhist, a Muslim and for most of the beginning of my life a Christian. WHat am I now? I am all that and much more than any faith label. So what if you (meaning each of us) stopped relating from fear of what you resent and simply listened without comment, nonverbal reaction or upset to your fellow Occupiers as a form of support and love?
What kind of love (ie. acceptance or citizenship) demands people be certain ways? Don't we already have that kind of democracy? What kind of "solidarity" expects agreement from others but doesn't give acceptance away freely? I can say finally is not democracy with a little "d". And I know all of us are up for considering that we dont know exactly what it looks like but this is what it looks like right now. It looks like newjk expressing her concerns and Eva sharing hers. And jim sharing his and Kyra sharing hers. It matters that we start from "i am you and you are me" and then maybe just maybe we all can be free.
My two cents with inflation.
Best, Kyra aka curioisty (kyraocity)
PS for those not aware of the history of US slavery related to capitalism check out
Racism: A History - Part One, The Colour of Moneyhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-967187698277037804
