Why I Occupy

My heart feels the great hope of Occupy is that a way around the existing structures will be created, not a destruction, and not a cooperation.

Why I Occupy

Occupy is tomorrow.

I believe the systemic faults in governance in the United States are too broken to repair. I think a whole new version is needed. I think the world is too complicated to plan that out. So I think the concepts, not of disarray and destruction, but of pockets of actions that work in the crevices and fault lines might be the way to evolve something better. I think consciousness is changing, the ecology is changing, time is faster, thought is more networked and less deep. I can't imagine where that will go. I think anarchy and Occupy could take us all there.

Background:

By October of last year, in order to collect together what I was reading and learning, I had an Occupy category on my hard drive.

The coming together and focus engaged my long-time interest in self-organizing systems and group process. And I could follow on the internet.

It was the technology and convenience that drew me to Howard Dean's meet-ups, to become a state Democratic delegate, and to feel fooled by the faux inclusiveness and already chosen messages of the Obama grass roots campaign.

Again, for Occupy, I could walk to the Santa Cruz meetings. Some were in the afternoon.

And I had time; I had done as much as I could with a project I'd been working on.

I went to some meetings, shy, learned a few new ways to organize, saw many parallels to existing structures, didn't know how to connect to the mostly in-person groupings, read Graeber's Debt, and others, defined anarchy for myself, was drawn to the pragmatism of action, and when the attendance became less, began to speak up a little. I was dismayed by the group distancing after River St and the camp closure, dismayed by law enforcement collusion and retaliation, now disturbed by the felony charges, and I can voice some of this distress.

I believe I have some social capital, an advocacy reputation, age, privilege – I want to use that to see those charges dismissed.

If Occupy succeeds in changing the world, it will be sweet for my granddaughter to know of my involvement.

So I'm here because of moral outrage, ego, and a fantasy of a change beyond imaging.