Hundreds of bodies were splayed out publicly as if on display for all to witness their daily human animal nature-in pain, in resistance, in pursuit of possibility. In contrast, the terrain of engagement amongst the occupiers was horizontal. The 300+ tents of Occupy LA, sprawled across 1.7 downtown public acres, seemed like psychosocial scabs at the feet of the monumental, vertical Los Angeles City Hall, which they surrounded. – from Time magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year issue, December 26, 2011 Brave, indeed.Īt the end of July, in an office in New York’s financial district, (the) proto-Occupiers met with some veterans of the protests in Spain, Greece and North Africa… Some standard leftists were pushing for a standard rally making a standard demand-no cutbacks in government social spending… (some) nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without pre-appointed leaders, committed to a general critique but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. One book was left behind, A Brave New World/Revisited by Aldous Huxley (1958), in which he expounds in essay form on the potential demise of democracy. On November 14, 2011, the 59th day of peaceful occupation by Occupy Wall Street in New York City, everyone at that camp was forcefully evicted and a library of a thousand books was violently demolished by local police. These are my reflections.Įach Occupy location across the country and around the globe has emphasized two interdependent strategies: externally, to publicly protest chronic and insidious social inequities, and internally, to develop sustainable governance and strategies for arriving at consensus amongst all participants. I chose to show up on site frequently over the next month offering engagement and conflict transformation skills to support their capacity to perform expressions of public outcry at our culture’s out-of-control social inequity. The terrain of people was bare, raw, gritty, and utterly public. Ghostly reflections of Hieronymus Bosch, Dante’s Inferno, and “Dawn of the Dead” interchangeably drifted through my mind when I first entered the tent city of Occupy Los Angeles in late October of 2011. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, c.
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