Getting people all in one place is amazingly hard

[koganbot]

I don't pay any attention to local news, owing to its shameful neglect of K-pop, so it didn't dawn on me until about four days ago that there was an Occupy Denver. The weather's been mostly nice, and it's only a 25-minute walk from my apartment to Civic Center Park, where they hang out.

I feel a bit hypocritical for not getting involved, since I'm the one who strenuously insists that the major flaw of my musicwrite world is its unwillingness to focus and follow through: that the people in it don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation and are totally unable to comprehend the need to persist on a topic, return to unanswered questions, develop rudimentary thoughts, work to understand someone's ideas, communicate their own, etc. Not that I expect anyone at Occupy Denver to do better or accomplish much of anything. But I doubt they'll do any harm. And as Mark said in WMS #13, getting people all in one place is amazingly hard, much less with at least the illusion of moving all in one direction, and persisting. So I may drop by, today or tomorrow, just to see.

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[koganbot]

Went for a couple of hours. Loved it. I'm terribly shy about approaching strangers, but decided I wasn't going to understand anything otherwise, so stuck out my hand a bunch of times and said, "I'm Frank, this is my first day here." Met several fellows whom I could imagine becoming friends with. Most people open rather than suspicious, understand that people show up for a multitude of reasons with a multitude of grievances and directions. Got buttonholed by a guy who had ideas right out of Dr. Strangelove, that liquid sodium additives to chicken were equivalent to Ritalin and so we were all being drugged, and this was the root of the problem. General assembly started right as he was getting into his ideas, and he was disappointed that he couldn't tell me all. There are two general assemblies a day, one at 3:00 PM and one at 7:00 PM. I attended the 7:00 PM. We formed in a circle on one of the big crosswalks through Civic Center Park, and discussed issues that were brought forth. One member of a committee wanted another member thrown off for what seemed like good reason, but the other member wasn't there to tell her side, and the more the issue was discussed the less it seemed helpful to punitively throw someone off of a committee and the more it made sense to see how to avoid the situation being repeated. The process was slow but prevented rash action; the longer people talked the better the solution. Slow, potentially wearying, but very sane. I was impressed.

Would like to give them one or two hours a day, just to have another body there. Is a two-minute walk from the main branch of the library, so I can go to the library to write and think, blissfully computer-free, and then drop by the ongoing demo.

[koganbot]

Ha! Notice that even just being some guy blogging, I wrote about an oddity (man bites dog) and about conflict rather than about ideas. When the press does the same, this is not owing to systematic attempts to misrepresent what goes on, but to the natural subconscious inclination of most reporters and readers. This is why press accounts will naturally veer towards conflicts between demonstrators and police.

Not that the general assembly process I was recounting doesn't have ideas embedded in it about how to make decisions.

The Website calendar claimed there would be an informational meeting for newcomers at 6:30 PM, but there was no such thing. At the general assembly, the point was made to use "I" rather than "we" when talking to the press if what you're saying hasn't been authorized by the assembly (and my impression is that the assembly isn't generally taking positions on what the demonstration stands for, though I don't know). Anyhow, lack of an orientation for newcomers and lack of nonviolence training seem like drawbacks, and of course suggesting that people use "I" rather than "we" could be part of such training.

I wonder whether some guy blogging his experiences (which I don't intend to do much) counts as talking to the press, or being the press. (I don't mean "counts in some people's mind," but rather "is effectively the same as.") So few people read me that this is probably a non-issue. Also, I'm pretty good at indicating when I don't know what I'm talking about, which is one reason I would never make money as a mainstream journalist.

On the Occupy Denver Website, the fact that the calendar starts with Monday rather than Sunday seems foolish, since it invites people (e.g., me) to misread.

Anyhow, for one person I talked to, a major issue was the Supreme Court's horrible decision that corporations are equivalent to people and that corporate money — e.g., a corporate political donation — is constitutionally protected speech. (But again, I've never read the decision, or much about it, so I don't know for sure that's what it says.) The fellow thought that the only way to reverse this was through a constitutional amendment. I think that that's even less of a possibility than is an ideological shift in the court over time, if conservative justices are replaced by more liberal ones or are occasionally converted to sanity.

Btw, I have no good opinion on when or whether direct democracy works, or some such. I thought the assembly made a good decision, one reason being that these people in this instance knew how to talk their way through an issue. But, as I'm suggesting in my original post when I mention the failure of music critics to talk their way and think their way through ideas, people individually and collectively often don't know how to talk their way through issues, and there's no guarantee that these particular people will know how to talk and think their way through every issue.

And also — see parenthetical two paragraphs back — my opinions on political issues, on macroeconomics, on global warming, on a whole bunch of stuff, aren't based on much knowledge but rather based on whom I've decided to believe...

[Think I'll give the rest of this thought its own post.]

[koganbot]

suggesting that people use "I" rather than "we" could be part of such training

Well, could be part of such orientation (I don't mean to imply that "we" is somehow more violent than "I").