December 30, 2011
OWS holiday travelers help movement to better work together
Before getting down to the business of its spokes council session Thursday evening, Occupy Portland activists took some time to hear announcements from some of the 60 or so people at the meeting. Mentioned were the upcoming port protest in Longview, Wash., potential lawsuits against the Portland police for the shutdown of their encampment, an idea for a healthcare group and campaign and a seed exchange.
But the announcement that garnered the most excitement came from an activist who called himself Yikes, who said he was from Occupy Wall Street, and wanted to talk with people from Portland about how to better coordinate the different arms of the 99 percent movement.
“We’re all simultaneously working on the same problems and issues,” he told me after the meeting. “I hope I can put a bunch of people in this room in direct contact with people working on the same things in New York.”
As we talked after the two-and-a-half hour meeting came to a close, several Occupy Portland activists approached him and took him up on his offer, such as Colin Miller, who helps out with the live stream efforts for Occupy Portland. Yikes said he would put him in touch with some of his friends that do live streaming in New York.
“What this movement needs more than anything else,” Yikes said after talking with Miller, “is unity and cohesion.”
While the holidays may have slowed down the number of direct actions Occupiers staged, it seems to have increased the cross-pollination of the movement.
Yikes is from Portland and moved to New York on September 26 to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. After months in the Big Apple, he came home to the Pacific Northwest for the holidays. “I just needed a little head-clearing after three months of non-stop protesting,” he said.
Last week, Occupy Oakland had a similar experience when five Occupy Wall Street activists headed home for the holidays to the Bay Area and joined their comrades there for a session on how the different fronts of the movement could better work together. Much of the discussion at the time was about how to better share the money Occupy Wall Street has accumulated in donations with other Occupies across the country.
“When people donated money to Occupy Wall Street, they were donating to the entire movement,” said an activist in Oakland last week at that meeting. “We’ve been doing these very bold actions that we need money for.”
It seems as if that meeting may have paid off for Occupy Oakland.
As Yikes and I spoke at an Occupy Portland meeting last night, the general assembly in New York approved making $25,000 available to Occupy Oakland for its efforts to plan the port protest in Longview, Wash. slated for January.
This item was on Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly website this morning: “Occupy Oakland proposal: $20,000 to help defray costs of Port Shutdown action, receipts are available and money will go to other West Coast Occupies who participated too. Friendly Amendments accepted by proposer: Add $5,000 to cover bail, food and travel costs; put receipts online. RESULT: CONSENSUS.”
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Another fine post by the travellin’ man. Big questions are arising in this movement, the biggest might be “where to from here?”. And who’s going to answer this one? Maybe this question will answer itself if we just keep talking, just keep shining a light on these issues, notably elevated to America’s front burner by our collective, if seemingly disparate, efforts. Speak on, Bob! Speak on, activists! Speak on, America’s new and beautiful voice! For this is history’s voice, humanity’s voice, the very same voice ringing forever through the heart of life. Portland rocks!