Whining will not effect positive change

[melchar]

It's been more than 2 months and the various 'Occupy' folks STILL don't have a message. The 'theme' that the occupy movements has expressed has been about whining.

Whining that they have the right to stand where they want, march where they want, loot when they want, camp where they want and to heck with the small businesses they are ruining in their wake.

How much time could it POSSIBLY take to make a 'soundbite' message? Hammering just one point home would make 'occupy' into a coherant movement. REINSTATE GLASS-STEAGALL** - 3 little words that even a mob could yell at the same time. You want to get Wall Steet's attention? Reregulate financial institutions!


[**Glass-Steagall passed in 1933 and prohibits banks from owning other financial companies & was repealed by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999.]

Comments

[seawasp]

They have many messages, though all of the messages come down to the same thing. They haven't yet become the revolutionaries, but if the "1%" don't read the warning signs -- and those signs are very readable -- they will become revolutionaries, and they'll have demands. But no one wants things to get to that point. Right now it's a movement of general anger and dissatisfaction, which has some very clear points in the general sense, but it's made of millions of people. You can't get five people to agree on toppings for a pizza; you expect millions of people to agree on ONE message when there's at least a dozen good major issues involved, ranging from banks that got to play games no private citizen would be allowed to get away with (and play those games with everyone else's money), to the lack of a decent healthcare system (and in fact a system that gets worse for the average person every year)?

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes. If they have the dedication to occupy, they -have- to have seen what their media impact is. The media focuses on the riot, looting, damage and then on those protesting. I have just spent a day with network TV news trying to interview the local SanFran occupiers and -none- of them could stammer out a reason they were there other than 'to demand justice' or 'take back what the man owes us'. In San Francisco!

And the occupiers didn't seem to be drugged, deranged or out of it. they were simply inarticulate. Since there has been media coverage of their daily assemblies [which are likewise inarticulate in not stating a reason for them being there], I find myself aghast at their lack of group message.

[seawasp]

Odd. My wife has been an Occupier (she can't actually do the camp-out thing, obviously) and she's talked to a lot of them, and she could give you a dozen off the top of her head. She has a Facebook community called Hell in a Hand Basket and most of what she posts there shows the reasons pretty clearly.

Whenever I've seen pictures of Occupy groups, there's always at least a few clear reason signs among the We Are The 99%.

On the other hand, I've also seen a number of articles saying that the lack of a message is a message in itself, that there are too many individual things to say and that having a single unified message also makes it easier for that message to be attacked rather than the base causes. This makes the overall message more "there's a LOT of problems that are hurting the majority of the population, you at the top know PERFECTLY WELL what they are, and we're sitting here until you've addressed enough of them that we no longer feel threatened."

I'm sympathetic to their cause. I can't be a part of it and I'd do it differently, but I am not able to commit huge chunks of time to any cause right now as I do in fact have a job (two of them) and need to keep doing them for the sake of my family.

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

This.

To me, it seems quite clear what the Occupiers are saying, and I understand why -- despite the early manifesto (http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/), which delineates the things they want changed-- they are not boiling their message down to a single soundbite which can be discounted/belittled/ignored. They are against the soundbites which have substituted for rational thinking, discussion and compromise in our government for about a decade. A lot of what's gotten us to this stage is politicians running on Pledges and sound bites which sound good, fit nicely on a bumper sticker, but don't address the core problems. Occupy can't reduce itself to sound bites, or it fails.

They are trying to demonstrate that there is a significant body of Americans who do not agree with big corporation welfare, bank deregulation, or all the things that highly-paid Washington lobbyists tell Congress the American People wants. They are trying to express the fact that dissenting American voices can't be brushed aside or ignored as only a few people not worth the politicians' time to pay attention to. They are trying to counteract the lobbyist megaphone that has Congress' ear. WE EXIST is a message in and of itself, when a government has turned inwards and is only listening to one point of view and forgetting a large swath of the country.

Occupiers DO carry signs with messages boiled down to distinct little bumper stickers for those who don't want to engage them and get more involved. They have had a lot of constructive talk; they are accomplishing things that aren't making the news at all, crowdsourcing to deal with various problems of occupiers and problems in the particular cities where the movement is happening. But of course, all the crowdsourcing in the world can't substitute for government, so they have to keep pushing until Congress stops yelling, "Write it on a bumper sticker and we'll get back to you! (not)" and finally say, "Okay, so, what's your problem?" Which only happens if there's enough Occupiers that Congress fears it may lose votes if it doesn't pay attention.

I am, quite frankly, too lazy to get aboard and haven't been paying enough attention. But I've gotten the message. I know what Occupy is about and why it's ongoing and why they haven't decided just to come up with "GLASS STEAGALL" or one other simple band-aid when they're trying to raise awareness of issues and change consciousness. I am fully aware that most of them aren't saying "Bring down the Man!" but rather "fix the system so it works for everyone!"

See this Wapo column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/occupying-the-millenial-way/2011/11/02/gIQAc6cdnM_story.html) from the head of MTV, of all people, for a useful perspective.

I kept up with what was going on with Occupy via UK news sources, because they're a lot more informative than American news. The Guardian UK has finally stopped its wall-to-wall Occupy coverage, but I learned a ton more reading that site in one day than all the American news sources put together.

I don't entirely agree with Occupy. But I do understand it. And I don't think they're just sitting on their asses freezing to death waiting for someone to give thme a handout. I give them a little more credit than that. They are trying to reframe the whole conversation about what America is and what government is for. And in that, I think they have succeeded wildly, since the issues they've raised have now become a daily part of conversation in the news, and presumably, are even penetrating Capitol Hill.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

It is interesting that they, and their message, is still more popular than any politician, banker or business person. To the point where even the right-wing republicans are trying to co-opt their message.

I'm still waiting to hear from anyone other than Fox that the actual occupiers are looting or much else.

[seawasp]

In any group of thousands you'll have crooks, assh*les, and so on. The people who see Occupy as an enemy instead of either ally or at least comprehensibly angry people recognize that if you focus on what the 0.1% of assholes and crooks do, you might get people to think that's all they do.

[neonbunny.livejournal.com]

The message of economic inequality has been around as long as money has been around, maybe even longer.

I think what the major turning point that happened here, was a group in new york stumbled on a new tactic, that suddenly got a group that would otherwise be ignored, nation attention.

And that's pitching tents.

This tactic, very much like the kids game of "i'm not touching you", is meant to provoke and draw a response. And that it did.

And as others saw a game changing tactic, they also adopted not only the tactic, but the name of the group that started it.

Protest groups everywhere jumped in on it, even though they had already been protesting. And suddenly, it became about camping, not the original cause that the protestors on Wall Street were about, which was economics.

In my home town of Oakland (which is about as opposite of Wall Street as you can get), the Occupy groups is made up mainly of the "stop the injunction" (anti-gang injunction group financed by the Nortenos that caused the Oscar Grant riots), "cause justa::just cause" (local immigration rights group), and a number of union organizers, with their usual union rights things, and a few anti-war protestors.

The biggest reason that there is no clear message is once the Occupation left Wall Street, and the tactic and catch-all name got adopted by organizations elsewhere, is that each individual group has their own message. Ask any one of the protestors, and they will give you very specific reasons for their protests. Ask two protestors, and you will never get the same answer.