Occupy, but don’t invade
January 29, 2012
By Steve Klinger
A friend sent an article that in its discussion of the larger movement lends another perspective to the incident at Eldorado, in a Santa Fe hotel last week:
Don’t Let Occupy Be Occupied: 6 Ways to Fight the Creep to Institutionalize
(http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/26-11).
Harriet Barlow argues persuasively that the Occupy movement must avoid being co-opted by various forms of institutionalization, which it can be shown have historically compromised radical movements from civil rights to women’s rights and beyond.
Barlow warns Occupy against coming under the IRS non-profit net, allowing anyone (the media especially) to anoint Occupy leadership, moving into bricks and mortar, drowning the movement in money, getting entrapped in a silo of specific demands, and forgetting the lessons of history.
Rather than dwell on those points (read the article; she does it well), I’d like to explore the other side of the coin, where she exhorts the movement to remain wild and free (quoting Alexa Bradley) and to build upon its strength of being outside the system by using such tactics as disruption and nonviolent civil disobedience, which she notes is not possible on a non-profit dime.
Invoking the non-hierarchical egalitarianism, the spontaneous, unfettered populist spirit that has had such widespread appeal across this nation (and internationally in the Arab Spring, Spain and elsewhere), would Barlow, and should we, then support the kind of actions some members of Occupy Santa Fe have been taking, including interrupting Susana’s address to the Legislature or an EIB meeting with mic checks or, most recently, interrupting the ALEC dinner for legislators at the Old House Restaurant inside the Eldorado Hotel?
After persuading myself I was absolutely in the right when I wrote the open letter and follow-up comments (www.thelightofnewmexico.com) in the aftermath of that incident, I had to pause and reconsider: Was I forgetting the spontaneous, free-spirited, unexpected, surprise-laden elements of this movement in which we have invested so much hope? Was I wrong to condemn a basically innocuous bit of noise and indignation, which surely pales a thousand-fold compared to the insidious tactics of a group like ALEC to get model bills before corporate-backed legislatures that undermine public education, workers’ rights, environmental protections and much more, causing suffering and deprivation among the 99 percent for the benefit of the 1 percent?
Was I being too moderate, too old-school in rejecting radical acts to accomplish what conciliation and compromise and “reform” have largely failed to bring about?
Was I falling into the reflexive media trap of swallowing the rightwing spin and allowing a bunch of lying conservative lawmakers to cover up their own violence and aggression by distorting and exaggerating what these six protesters actually did or didn’t do?
On reflection, I stand by my original conclusion, which is that these Occupy members bungled the Eldorado incident, bringing harm to the movement, and showing they need to refine their concept of civil disobedience. There’s a place for surprise, interruption, mic checks and other truly non-violent actions, but they must be appropriate, clever, well-executed and non-threatening. As a counterpoint to the street demonstration outside the hotel, an effective act of civil disobedience might have been a human chain or a group sitting in the entryway, blocking access in a non-threatening manner.
Even the restaurant “interruption” could have been done effectively, with humor and cleverness. The six could have dressed as waitpersons and quietly, calmly given out their mock menus with smiles on their faces (and with photographers and videographers discreetly in tow, to document any adverse reaction). This satirical and mischievous kind of street theater would more likely have won public support, especially if a subsequent physical confrontation could have been clearly attributed to the ALEC diners or security forces.
Instead, we had the predictable he-said/she-said accounts of events that turned off the public and distanced allies of the movement, including several key legislators.
To make matters worse, spokespersons for the Occupy group doubled down, distorting Martin Luther King’s words and tactics and blaming legislators such as Brian Egolf for not defending their actions. They refused to admit they screwed up, refused to distance themselves in any way for the unruly protesters. The Occupy SF media group took three days to issue a lengthy statement cataloguing the offenses of ALEC and those who reacted to the protesters and belatedly claiming the menus were not thrown but inadvertently flew out of a protester’s hand when she was shoved from behind.
Unfortunately, the more this young movement conflates invasion with occupation and aggressive, threatening interruptions with more effective forms of civil disobedience, the more they will become a fringe element and weaken Occupy as a whole. Instead of bringing together the 99 percent, they will only become another 1 percent, spreading divisiveness this last, best hope for restoring justice and democracy in a society teetering on the edge of a cosmic darkness can ill afford.
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