Disappeared News

“Occupy didn’t seem remarkable on September 17, 2011, and not a lot of people were looking at it when it was mostly young people heading for Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. But its most remarkable aspect turned out to be its staying power: it didn’t declare victory or defeat and go home. It decided it was home and settled in for two catalytic months.”

by Larry Geller

Occupy Wall Street is now one year old. So it’s time for the commercial press to announce that it has been one big failure, a pop from a firecracker that soon burned out.

Don’t believe it. Check out Occupy Your Victories: Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary, by Rebecca Solnit, posted on TomDispatch.com.

In the beginning, a physical occupation was an important tactic, and it still is (for example, in Honolulu). But don’t let the commercial press equate success with tents in the park. Watch for words of doom from the Associated Press and the rest of the usual suspects. It bugs them that change is still happening and that Occupy movements have, and still are, movers and shakers in a new national protest movement.

Tents and general assemblies and the acts, tools, and ideas of Occupy exploded across the nation and the western world from Alaska to New Zealand, and some parts of the eastern world -- Occupy Hong Kong was going strong until last week. For a while, it was easy to see that this baby was something big, but then most, though not all, of the urban encampments were busted, and the movement became something subtler. But don’t let them tell you it went away.

Aside from movement events, the internalization of Occupy’s “the 99%” vs. “the 1%” has framed thought and action this past year. The realization of institutional oppression (which is a form of violence) has not gone away—it’s growing stronger each day.

Inoculate yourself against the coming press condemnation by checking out Rebecca Solnit’s article.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 9/17/2012 11:37:00 AM