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Good morning, Firedoglake Community!
I haven’t posted here for some time and some days I haven’t even thrown in a comment or two. But not for lack of interest. I’ve been short on time and energy and both these precious commodities seem to be shrinking at an increasing rate since I’ve moved into my eighth decade of life.
On the Sunday afternoon of January 8th, a small group of concerned people, most of whom had been working with Occupy Denver, ten miles to the north, met in the basement of our local public library. It was the first General Assembly of Occupy Littleton …. and we had a reporter present; Kelsey Whipple who writes a blog for Denver’s alternative newspaper, Westword. Here’s what she had to say about our suburban Occupy.
Since that Sunday, Occupy Littleton has expanded. We are now a small group of dedicated Occupiers, who have: developed a website, Occupy Littleton; expanded our Facebook coverage; formed Communications, Media and Non-violence Working Groups; and set up a Yahoo group for our internal communications.
We coordinate with and support Occupy Denver, attending their weekly teach-ins, like the Occupy Economics series given by Chad Kautzer of CU Denver.
Some of us are active in the joint Foreclosure Working Group of Occupy Denver and the Colorado Progressive Coalition, researching legal questions, educating and planning direct actions. Yesterday, we disrupted the weekly foreclosure auction at the Denver County Clerk and Recorder’s Office. For many of us, it was our first confrontation with the System. Scary and exhilarating all at the same time. One of our OL Occupiers had volunteered to record the action, surreptitiously, within the auction room, where cell phones and cameras are banned. She was successful, as you can see from the video that resulted.
Our members fan out into our neighboring Occupations, working with Occupations at Denver, Colorado Springs and Grand Junction. This Saturday, Occupiers from all over Colorado are meeting at UC Boulder for a day long round of networking, workshops and planning.
Something is about to happen. The signs of change are still minute, tiny points of green soon covered by spring snows, blushes of purple haze worn by branches that yesterday were brown. But join us in our suburban library basement and watch proper white-haired ladies and solemn dads, in between their kids’ soccer practice and music lesson, hold a discussion on Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail.
The System is broken; corporations and their unlimited money rule our Government; the voice of We the People has been strangled. How do we use Non-Violent Tactics to directly confront our Oppressors? How do we use Non-Violence to set up what King calls “a constructive non-violent tension that is necessary for growth” and change? Scary, but exhilarating.
17 Comments
I think first we need ideas about HOW to fix the system (actually, various “systems” need fixing, and they’re often inter-related.)
We need a central gathering place to exchange ideas about how to get out of this mess (or these oligarch-designed traps, if you will.)
Then we need marketing/advertising/”propaganda.” Maybe even focus-group-tested and the whole nine yards.
Recommended, btw!
“We need a central gathering place to exchange ideas …”
Do we ever, athena1! And I spend my days, as I’m sure you do, running from one oligarch-induced disaster to another. From the local town who are opposed to having fracking wells drilled near their water supply (google “Erie Rising”), to the laughable, so-called “Foreclosure Settlement”, to women being banned from Congressional discussions on contraceptive availability.
Some of this stuff is so bad that you could film it unedited for a Monty Python sketch.
As for how to get out of this mess? Are the normal route of letters and petitions and polite rallis and visits to your Congresscritter’s office, going to work? When we know that our Politicians are mostly controlled by the big money corporations?
I have lost count of the letters I have written, the petitions I have signed, the rallies I have attended. I’ve travelled to DC and bearded my state legislators in their own lairs.
Welcome back, eclair; I’ve missed you. And it’s great to hear of your Occupy work, and especially the foreclosure auction disruption. ;o)
Can’t wait to watch the video, and the ones at Occupy Boulder (my old stompin’ grounds, lol!
Arne and Obama are continuing their quests to defund education, murder teachers’ unions, tie jobs to test scores while pretending NOT to, and not just in aid of better education, either. But for privatization and charter schools run/influenced by Big Business, so that workshop might be muy interesting.
Rec’d and a half.
Eclair, you are such an inspiration! Was that you at the end of the foreclosure video? Just what you all did is what is going to work, eventually (or else we are all in bigger trouble than we know): regular people showing up and putting their bodies on the gears until there are so many of us that the gears can’t move any longer. Hopefully, by the time that happens, we will have gotten to know and trust each other and we can all work together towards something new. Thank you for spending your eighth decade (and, I suspect, probably most of the previous seven) working so hard to make things better.
Welcome back above ground and to the shedding of silence protecting the Under-cover Brother, Baracketeer!
Hi Wendy, I’ve been popping in to read your posts, among others. You cover a lot of ground and have so much information at your fingertips. Keep on writing!
Yeah, that was me. I’m not good with off-the-cuff remarks and I was soooo relieved that we had managed to pull off the action without anybody getting arrested, that I was babbling a bit. Truthfully, I was scared. I’m a non-confrontational person and when, at a meeting of our foreclosure group, I found myself saying that I would do this AND I would be the group police liaison, I immediately got a horrible case of heartburn and really thought I might die on the spot!
I’m much more comfortable in the background, observing and writing. But, I feel strongly that now is the time for us to get our bodies out here and do some non-violent push back. But we need lots more of us.
Have we gotten to the end of the details and interconnections of the issues yet? I know that I was not expecting 1%-99% relative to banking to lead to the massive numbers of vacant buildings in the US that are protected/created by local ordinances, tax laws, and the way estates are handed down. I’m still not sure that we have identified all of the tentacles of the vampire squid.
How to fix the system. Well general assemblies, teach-ins, demonstrations, and so on seem to be working — as difficult as the horizontal relationships are to work out.
We have a central gathering place for ideas–the internet. The question is how to index, catalog, …that so that folks can find what they need in order to fix the manifestation of the system in their local situation.
Marketing/advertising is part of the problem IMHO not part of the solution. People are tired of being messaged at. They would like someone to actually listen to them as human beings.
Most of the practical work is known items. We know how to set up affinity groups, co-ops, collectives, corporations, ….We know how to do urban farming, alternative off-the-grid energy, …property title searches (excluding MERS)….medics, sanitation, all of this stuff has 40, 50, 60, 100 years of documented practice. We know facilitation, poster arts, puppetry, ….
What might be most useful is to identify and list what we DON’T YET know how to do.
Well done. Recommended.
Highly Recommended!!More power to you Eclair!! You are doing the dirty work sp all our kids can benifit from an America for all the people and not just for the very itsy bisty tenie widdle few who own everything including the courts and all the governments down to the dog catcher!!
No better way to be spending your time as you enter your eighth decade! Keep up the good work.
No kidding. For people of a certain age (myself included), doing something that is illegal, much less confronting a cop – even politely – is quite a paradigm shift. But there is such power in a large group of people acting calmly, with moral authority.
The Letter from a Birmingham Jail should be required reading for everybody these days; a lot of history has been forgotten. Especially the radical part, where we take back our power. We’re going through some hard stuff at OO around strategy and non-violence. But when I think about it, no wonder the kids are so angry; they’ve been lied to for pretty much their whole lives. I had a Civics teacher who told us that our textbooks contained mostly lies; we set them aside and read The White House Transcripts instead. But those who are in their 20s or even 30s were probably fed a steady diet of corporate consumerism and violent video games.
I hope you will give yourself a pat on the back for stepping outside your comfort zone. I know that it does not go unnoticed.
Yer 80?
Ok, thought were MUCH younger, decades younger.
Welcome back, good health to ya, and wow, way to get involved.
I guess I had you confused with another eclair like name who I thot was married to Bill, who was an editor here . . . and has been gone a long time with no explanation by the blog bout him, or the Clare (bread baker? like Bill).
All that aside, damn, ma’am . . . bless ya!
Larue-59.
Thanks, Larue. But before I start getting calls from those cosmetics advertisers who put ads on blogs: 80 year old Littleton mom looks 60!!!!! ….
8th decade of life equals being in one’s seventies. Although I still hope to be agitating in my 9th decade.
My hat is off to you sir!
Keep up the good work, and keep us up to date.
Littleton huh? I grew up there, it’s ground zero of the Reagan disaster and the 20 years that followed. We were in one of the 13 or 14 districts where the Republicans ran unopposed, although I haven’t been back since 1985 so I have no idea what it’s like now (probably much the same). If it’s happening there, I guess it’s really happening…