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Permalink Reply by Ben Roberts on October 23, 2011 at 5:36am

Great discussion topic, Jim!

I finally got down to Wall Street on Friday.  It was a blast.  Great energy and conversation.  

The highlight for me, aside from promoting Occupy Cafe (and getting a generally quite positive reaction), was the GA.  So many people in the gathering that they needed a double People's Mic.  It featured an emergency agenda item: a "mountain" of wet two-day-old laundry and a proposal for finance to release $3000 to rent a truck and take it to a coin operated laundromat at the Northern tip of Manhattan where volunteers would wash it.  The proposal was approved... after one hour of discussion!

Now, many would look at that as evidence that this movement is a joke.  Indeed, Gary Horvitz directed me to this HuffPo piece yesterday suggesting that there are problems arising out of the challenge of making decisions under this full participatory democracy model.

I disagree.  for me the power of this movement on the ground is its modeling of a transformed space in which democracy reigns and the people have a voice.  As Lizzie Whiddicombe writes in this week's New Yorker

Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week.... was a bit like visiting a civilization at its peak: Paris in the twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at the very least, Timbuktu in the fifteen hundreds.

Yes, there was something comic about it too.  The Peoples' Mic kept reminding me of Life of Brian ("Yes! We are all different!), especially when the subject was a mountain of mildew.  But it was also beautiful to experience the patience of the group as the discussion went on, and both their dedication to "the process" and their tolerance of the inevitable deviations from it.

Another highlight would have been seeing Pete Seeger, who must have been standing only fifty feet or so away from me as I hung out around 10:30pm with a group of occupiers who were assembling at 95th and Broadway to march down to 59th and occupy Columbus Circle at midnight for a concert.  By sheer coincidence, I had parked my car a block away and taken the subway downtown.  My timing was perfect when I returned, and I also had my nineteen year old daughter Emily with me, having just met her and my did for dinner.  And while the march and concert were tempting, I needed to get back on the road and head home.

Emily, who lives with her mom on the Upper West Side, is a theater girl.  Not too political, she hadn't been paying the Occupation a whole lot of attention.  So it was great to find that the occupiers had come to her neighborhood and to watch her reactions to the show.  She was especially delighted with the People's Mic, which I had just described to her over dinner.   She also instantly bonded with many of the younger occupiers.  

I don't think she'll be spending a whole lot of time downtown, but you never know.  First she's heading off on a tour with a comedy troupe called Wham City.  Maybe you can check them out, Jim, when they come to Asheville on 10/29.  Or better yet, get them to come perform for Occupy Asheville!

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Permalink Reply by Raffi A. on November 12, 2011 at 12:45am

Jim, thanks for the question.

And Ben, thanks for your story. Really liked the openness and energy. I've enjoyed hearing the diversity of perspectives on local occupations in talking to friends around the world.

I was at my local occupation  and camped there in the beginning but the scene was so discouraging that I've ended my physical involvement.

Details at my blog, Reinhabit San Diego.

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