Occupy Denver Needs A Dose of Focus

The Occupy Denver, General Assembly is just beginning to discover why there have been no sustained direct democracies since ancient Athens. After spending many hours at the protests, I can report a lot of heart, a bit of testosterone, and a growing sense of frustration at the almost complete lack of organized messaging. It frustrated me personally as well.

By example, at one point, in a crowd that ranged in age from the Beat Generation to the children of iPhone junkies, I found myself arguing with a young man, who was so full of himself and hormones, that he felt it was necessary to endanger everyone around him by erecting a tent on the sidewalk, as about 10 armed members of local law enforcement were closing in.

I was not the only person telling him to take it down, but I was only one of two people who had the guts to actually get right in his face and remind him that his little tent and his little stunt would figure prominently in the next media cycle and serve only to de-legitimize the efforts of the hundreds of other people who came to peacefully and legally air their grievances. I was right, of course, but he didn’t care. He was more concerned with increasing the size of his genitalia than expressing any substantive idea. It is also quite possible that he was a right-wing plant. The crowd was also laced with not-so-under-cover police. There are always a few of each at every protest, I guess. 

But there were also hundreds of decent people who were there for a legitimate purpose. And let’s get one thing straight. The vast majority of these protesters were folks with whom I would be proud to sit down at Thanks Giving dinner.

The main problem that I see with Occupy Denver, and I believe that this problem may be endemic to the Occupy movement in general as well, lies in it’s lack of focus. I find it troubling, that a movement whose members commonly use so many high tech, informational/communication/media tools would allow these events to present so confused and disorganized to the degree that their purpose (they actually do have one) largely remains an enigma to the general public. As a result their ability to engage and enlist the public remains ineffectual.

Yeah, I know, the General Assembly is trying to be all democratic, but it is not working. This is just a  (paraphrased) sample of some of the signs I saw at the Denver rallies in the last week:

Get Corporate Influence out of Government

Get Corporations Out Of Elections

Koch Brothers Stay Out Of Colorado (mine)

Don’t shaft The Middle Class (also mine)

Jobs, Not Cuts

Income Inequality
Indict The Banks
Eat The Rich

No More Corporate Greed

No More Wall Street Bailouts

No More Assault on Worker’s Rights

No More Union Busting

Tax The Rich

Cut The Deficit

Balance The Budget

Don’t Cut Medicare

Don’t Cut Medicaid

Don’t Cut Social Security

Health Care For All

No More War(s)

No More Human Rights Violations Abroad

Can’t Pay My Student Loans

No GLBT Bashing

Choice/Abortion

Child Care For All

Immigration Reform

End Homelessness

And so many of the protesters, mostly the young ones, acted as if the subject of their personal signage could be easily addressed and fixed immediately, like it only required an ap that they could upload to their iphones. I heard tons of different ways in which people were getting screwed in and by this country and almost nothing about how to effectively use the Occupy movement to redress those grievances.

No, I am not jonesing to become the de-facto leader of Occupy Denver, but I do think that they could benefit from a little strategic advice and here goes:

Please focus a bit more. If you took the time like I did to look at all the signs, you would see that the message on every single serious sign is a subset of the singular desire for government to start working for them again. When I talked to individuals, each seemed to get, but many of their signs did not express, the simple but profound idea that government is not working for them (and 99% of the country) because corporate and/or otherwise moneyed interests have literally bought so many politicians in government but, if we worked together to get the big money out of government, the wheels of progress for the rest of us could start rolling again. 

How can the Occupy movement gain any credibility with the general public, (and they need the general public) when the news media can pick from attention-starved ranters on the fringes to fill insatiable news cycles? The unfortunate answer is the movement can’t gain credibility under those conditions and it will wither and die as the leaves fall from the trees…or,

The General Assembly can advertise on all social media in advance of the next rally, that the messaging must be tightly focused around getting big money out of government. There are plenty of different catchy, clever, heartfelt signs that can be made and displayed about subset issues, but only insofar as they expressly relate to getting big money out of government.

The General Assembly can and should empower some of their more assertive members at each site to tell the “cojones guys” to get with the program or go back to the sports bars from whence they came.

Those same members must have the discipline to tell the person who says, “it’s a free country and I can say what I want,” to go start her own friggin movement somewhere else, because this one is about getting big money out of government. For every disgruntled stoner/boomer who toddles home, you will gain 20 more who dare to show up, once they are sure what the movement actually stands for.

If the public cannot easily digest the method, they will assume only madness and will stay away. You need large numbers to attain an effective political force for change. Right now, you are on a road to becoming trivialized and then brutally suppressed.

Please believe me. Millions of other old fogies and I have fought and won this same kind of fight before.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

P.S. The next Occupy Denver rally will be on Saturday, October 22, 2011, at noon, in Civic Center Park.