Forum Post: How to REALLY Occupy America
Posted 12 years ago on June 17, 2012, 12:29 a.m. EST by kk23
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To be frank this situation has been going on for decades. Home foreclosures, major increases in college tuition, jobs being sent overseas and the middle class steadily decreasing. The reason why is was low on the radar is because it was happening to minorities and very few whites. Now that there is even more of an attack on the middle class affecting more whites there is now a need to feel outraged and betrayed by the government. I personally don't care about what the reasons are for the protest to be happening now, but I will like to offer some advice since this movement has been stalemated for the past few months. Looking back at the 1950's and 1960's civil rights movement when blacks were denied the right to sit at an all white lunch counters they went and sat at those lunch counters they did not sit across the street at the park with signs they intentionally committed civil disobedience. When blacks wanted equal treatment they boycotted the buses no picket signs hitting them where it hurts the most their pocket book. With blacks carpooling and choosing to walk to work the bus companies lost money because the majority population was not riding the buses. Businesses will only listen to you when you hit them where they will feel it the most. You don't like what Bank of America is doing go to Bank of America and have a sit in. Disrupt there daily business and therefore stop them from making money. You don't like what's going on in Wall Street stage a public sit in on Exchange. Do you realize that with just one hour of disruption you can stop businesses from making over a million dollars. Corporations will be forced to listen to the people. Do not be afraid to commit civil disobedience, if you are this movement will not be successful. Pack the jails, the more people are in there the more the state has to pay to process them, pay to hold them and bring them in front of a judge. Be smart and learn from history there is a way to be heard and it requires more than signs and mass sit ins in public parks. It requires getting arrested, getting roughed up by the police and most of all risk. If you are not willing to risk these things the movement will not escalate to a global scale and bring real change in which not just we the 99% need but as well as the rest of the world.
When blacks sat at segregated lunch counters, they directed their protest directly at the injustice, their right of equal access. What if they chose a different tactic, like blocking the entrance to the lunch counter? Would that have been as effective?
No, it would have shifted the focus of the injustice of racial segregation taking place at the lunch counters to the injustice of blacks blocking the entrances. The entrances of the lunch counters were committing no crimes. The blacks would have been viewed as the perpetrators of injustice and rightly so.
That is exactly what some members of Occupy have done. By blocking entrances and disrupting normal business, they have shifted the focus of injustice onto themselves and away from the banks. Did bank entrances commit injustice? The focus on injustice does not belong at the entrances of banks, it belongs on the injustice they have committed. If they instead focus their actions on illegal actions by the bank such as improperly foreclosing on houses with fraudulant paperwork, that would be proper.
Holding up a sign across the street from a bank is a legitimate way to protest because the words on the sign focus on the injustice. Blocking the entrance of a bank is an illegitimate form of protest and is one example of the many improper tactics used by Occupy that has stunted it's growth.
Civil disobedience is a great tool to highlight injustice, but when improperly used, it can cause more harm than good. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus so that a white person could have it, that act of disobedience focused directly and properly on the injustice.
Civil disobedience for the sake of ending injustice takes noble character, but when it is used unjustly, that character is no longer present and without it, injustice will endure.