inclusive exclusive

oh the discussion continues.
may we learn to listen.
may we learn to listen.
may we learn to listen.

a fellow occupier says: "we shall join the march of the tea party and swell their ranks"
i say: NO!!!! that is NOT what occupy does.
fellow occupier says: "then you contradict yourself, with what you have said in that paragraph for the mayor"

i tried to give an analogy: the occupy movement accepts everyone, from every creed, but the colors we fly get left at home. i suggested that it is quite one thing if the hells angels and outlaws showed up with their colors flying, versus joining up with the occupation as occupiers ... then i mentioned the WONDERFUL group occupy the hood, where gangsters and others have joined together and dropped their colors, to become occupiers.
still my fellow occupier asserted that my position of we do not join the tea party, and the tea party flies no flag with us (other than the american flag) as hypocritical and misdirected.

this same fellow occupier spoke of our movement as a protest ... which it IS NOT!!!!!!!
we are a movement and we engage in protest and marches, that is a part of public outreach and education. until we learn to differentiate this small but important part as occupiers, we are not completely empowered as to what we are trying to accomplish.

no more stalins, no more lenins ...
no more burning bushes,
a palimpsest is best ...

first amendment and occupy encampments

intentional community and the occupy movement:
one aspect of the occupy movement and its first amendment practices which is never addressed is why we gather and live in tents as a community...

this aspect of the movement is the intentional community, or camp/us, as i like to call it ... this is the social experimental and the educational basis of our occupy community, wherein a broad spectrum (or to use a cliche), a 'diverse' group of citizens gather across generational, socio-economic, religious, cultural, and political backgrounds in the camp, and learn to communicate, assimilate and operate together, collectively enacting the changes necessary to control their own embodiment of resources.

it is important to keep this aspect in mind... and to be very vociferous about it. how to be vociferous and not construed as subversive is the challenge. we are not so much raising an army, as civic leaders, each and every one.

the intentional camp/us

there is talk that swilled around the general assembly last night, in regards to the vitality or necessity of the camp... oh it made my heart flutter, and in my only attempt to address the issue one on one with a critic, i failed.

he did not want to listen.
oh listening ... once we have that tool down, we will speak with clarity, together.
but this post is NOT about listening.

this post is about why we are living in tents in the middle of winter ... and why occupy MUST continue to live in this manner. i am not saying it is the ONLY thing we must do ... but it is one of the most challenging!

have you stopped to wonder WHY so much time and effort is going into shutting down the intentional communities of wall street?
because, if we can succeed at this stage, to live and work together, to learn to listen to each other and solve our issues collectively, we have learned to dismantle the system.
we WIN.
it is the biggest threat there is.

have you stopped to wonder WHY so many people think that this aspect of occupy is dangerous or trivial?
because they do NOT understand it ...
because starting at the bottom and building our way up is MESSY. because horizontal or direct democracy is a SLOW and often messy process ... because the truth is often brutal and difficult to face.

those who come and go

whether you physically occupy a camp, or no, it is irrelevant!!

those who come and go, are VITAL members of the collective "we" of the occupy movement!!!

you are the foot "soldiers" (hate that the most descriptive language i can employ is militaristic).

you are the ones who whisper over fences to your neighbors, in community groups to your friends, in households over meals.

you are the ones who sway minds and hearts of family and community members.

you are the ones who open the door for those who don't yet know or understand our movement.

in short, you are we.

we are a diverse body of beings, beginning a conversation to build new systems that exist outside of the broken ones that have kept marching the 99% along!!

i have heard too often, "i support occupy, but i am not an occupier!"

to be an occupier does not mean you must become a member of the symbolic people's square or space.

it does not mean you need to go through the grueling aspect of living in the intentional community "camp/us" ... while that work is oh so important and vital to our movement, the other aspect of participating in the movement by visiting camp/us attending workshops, giving workshops and registering your voice in the general assembly is ESSENTIAL ... it is important for as many chuk shonen's (tucsonans) to learn the process of horizontal or direct democracy ... it takes a while, it's difficult because it's slow ... and we aren't used to taking our time in this culture of the united states.

in fact, the media and our government banks on this flaw in our inculcated minds ... they rest assured that we have an attention span of about six weeks!! if you can remember the iran-contra hearings from the late 80"s, and the subsequent election of bush as president within eight weeks of those hearings, this should help to drive the point home.

we must take our time, we must learn to listen.

once we have learned to listen, and learned the process of how to practice horizontal democracy in action, we will be a powerhouse community!!!!!!!!!

i am excited for us.
let's suspend the need for instant gratification, and let's all work together to re-build a world that is functional instead of dysfunctional!!!

we value yer work.

you are our hero.

we are all heros!!

my phone was stolen from IT on thursday when we got back from the foreclosure intervention.

i left the camp/us tonight after speaking with one of its leaderless leaders, a talking head.
i packed my shit outta there.

it was the only means by which i could throw up a block.

it seems that one of our homeless folks and a hearty participant in the movement had a breakdown friday night.
in my attempt to speak with said leaderless leader and talking head for our local movement, he was condescending and an all around jerk in regards to my attempt to communicate on behalf of the fellow occupier.

my complaint was that the thieves who took my phone (caught on camera) were still on campus, simply by denying the theft ... and were, furthermore, set up in a very nice tent (don't know if they provided it, or if it came from donations) ... and my homeless friend, well he was allowed to sleep outside on the ground in that storm of wind and rain and the only way he was given shelter was through me accepting a tent donation and passing it to him. i had thought i would occupy midnite's tent in protest and solidarity until he was returned to camp/us.

what really made me angry enough to leave the tucson movement was that talking head for OT said:

l) he is pressing assault charges against our homeless occupier, because he was violated in such an egregious manner (to be spat in the face) ...

my homeless friend had made such great strides. he came so broken and so afraid that he could not look us in the eye ... and he has grown in leaps and bounds because for once, he is being accepted on human terms as being valuable.

out of many of the homeless at OT, he is one who keeps trying to grow.

leaderless leader's inability to allow leniency for our fellow occupier's condition just kills me.

this man, who is a talking head for OT proved to he isn't even on page one. if he had just considered forgiving our fellow occupier (because maybe our comrade would refuse to come back) in our conversation, i would not have been compelled to pack up.

but i can NOT reconcile myself to this talking head, who doesn't live on camp/us... who doesn't sleep through the night with the honkers who hurl their invectives at us ... who has no clue as to how demoralizing it is ... who doesn't understand that a broken man can be triggered into madness ... who doesn't understand that this man's spitting in his face (while a very nasty and aggressive thing to do) probably took a lot of self control.

i believe that mr. talking head FEARS mr. homeless man and his spittle, because he thinks that his condition is infectious, or that he is diseased and could have passed a disease to him.

mr. talking head's condescension and inability to understand my attempt to communicate with him, "are you threatening me?" when i state emphatically, "i hope you get to live in the streets one day and experience being beaten and jumped and reduced to nothingness because you are homeless." showed me just how deep his ignorance is.

or his defensive statement that i was angry with him, just because i don't like him - my response: "i don't dislike you, i don't even KNOW you!" and when he urged me to press charges against the thief , i responded by asking "have you ever been mugged?" again, he took this as an affront, and stood to leave (i've been mugged, i was mugged at knife point in paris, france, when i was living and working there one summer ... the police NEVER retrieved anything taken from me in that incident. i am not a VICTIM!!!!) ... i might be a madwoman, but when he got up as i asked the question ... saying "we will have to just agree to disagree."

i knew i was done with occupy tucson. it's the only block i had, the only way to say, our talking head, one of our leaderless leaders is SO out of line with the movement, that i must retreat.

i went to the tent, grabbed my stuff, put it in my car and left.

ah... this morning i awoke on the couch in the back of the shop i work at.

it seems that it has been days since i've had a good night's sleep.

we've been running on the lamb for what feels like weeks, which is in fact only a matter of days.

there was the first night of poncho villa, when we had as a group, been evicted from the armory camp/us.

oh lord, we had dug our heels in there... and the police arrived with a mandatory eviction read by the chief of police which gave us a one hour timeline for evacuation.

i believe they anticipated non-cooperation. but we ceded to the authorities and immediately worked like mad to get the hell out ... with all of our equipment in tact. it took us double the time they gave. but because we working, they agreed to allow us the extra time within reason.

after arrival at poncho villa, we spent another several hours moving in.

oh what a mess it was.

the next night was the terrible wind and rain storm.

the night after that was just a chill ... and helicopters circling endlessly.

there is a terroristic threat in that ... once a routine is set between occupiers and the authorities; to break the trust with the eviction, sets the camp/us at unease (or at least me).

so i finally broke down and slept like a baby on the couch in the back of the shop. i hadn't intended it. i had meant to go to the all souls procession. which i missed last year.

i awoke at around 6 a.m. to a slight chill ... and when i went out the front door, i realized that the chill was sodden with overnight rain. which (of course) made me worry for the crew at poncho villa camp/us. were they still there? had they been rousted in the night? were all the tents and all the occupiers beat down from this unusual cold?

free radicals

last night there was a conversation between some of the camp/us members as to when in their lives and our national history they became radicalized.

their stories were about being teenagers and young adults, the civil rights movement, the death of mlk and jfk, rfk, the vietnam war, kent state and the like. each had a different moment when they looked at the big picture and said, "things are NOT right, and i MUST join [respective movement] in order to try to change things." i will not relate these stories, because these stories are best from the tongues that issued them. however, these stories triggered a reflection of my own history with an impulse to locate where and when i became a free "radical".

i think i located it -this moment of radicalization- in my own history:

it was at the age of three.

my father who trained at west point, and was groomed as an officer to lead his comrades in the art of war, was caught crying with my mother. he was sitting on her lap at the kitchen table. tears were flowing down his face. when i asked why he was crying, he replied, "your mother bit me."

three days later, he was packed off in his handsome uniform with a duffle bag and a brief case, to a land far away, a land called "vietnam".

during that long year, i would see images, horrifying images on the television news, reports from the land where my father, the soldier, was living without my mother and i. i would lay in bed at night, troubling over this war, i knew only that it included destruction, and two sides in opposition. i would puzzle my young brain to figure out a way to put an end to this devastation, for the most selfish of reasons, i wanted my father to be returned whole and alive, and did not want to lose him. i was haunted for the duration of his tour of duty there.

i thought of warrior olympics: two sides could train for athletic mock battle, the winners take all.

i thought of a type of lottery: paper, rock, scissors between the leaders who wanted to engage in such wars. winner takes all.

i know that many theoretical means of engaging in pseudo-warfare were considered by my young mind and dismissed over the long period of my father's absence, until finally, i believed i had found the ultimate solution:

i believed i could build a platform between the warring sides, and wave a white flag, issuing a cease fire and the proclamation that someone would have to shoot me first, before they could proceed.

oh the innocence of babes, i honestly believed this was the only workable solution! who could shoot a child to continue with the barbarous acts of war?

this year of my life, was the year of my radicalization.

i remembered too, that as a young child, my father had emphatically told me if i threw so much as a penny in the trash, i would adversely affect the value of money at large. somehow what was minted and pressed as money was inherently bound to the value of ALL of it remaining in circulation.

i'm not quite certain why my father related this story to me. i remember clearly that i believed he had given me the key to live in a world where money was no longer in circulation.

whatever his purpose, i feel certain it had the opposite effect of his intentions.

after being handed this information, i purposely threw away pennies at first, then nickels, then dimes, and quarters ... waiting to see some effect crop up due to my transgressions. i was disappointed and frustrated by the whole experiment, as i never felt any discernible shift in money's operations.

my mind has always been preoccupied with socio-political and economic issues... i don't know if we are born with spirits that are inclined toward certain mindsets, or if our circumstances in life create the mindset. was it growing up in a military household that made me hyper aware of these issues from the youngest of ages in a very personal way? or was it that i was born with these proclivities and they were informed by the environment i developed in?