A Protest Movement That Died Before It Got Started

With all the things that are happening in the Unites States right now, it was inevitable that people would be trying to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly in the form of protests and gatherings to promote awareness and specific political agendas.  I was thinking about this today and started wondering what this landscape would look like in a year from now.

After thinking about it for awhile, it all seemed vaguely familiar.  It took me a little while to figure it out, but this all reminds me of the early days of the Occupy movement.  We had our own version of Occupy here in Omaha.  When we first heard about the Occupy movement, anyone who cared was pretty excited about it.  There were all kinds of protest events organized to voice dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth, congressional gridlock, the death grip that big business had on our legislators, atrocities of war, social reform, and anything else we could think of that sounded like it needed to be protested.

The signature of the Occupy movement became the 99% vs 1% thing.  According to someone somewhere, one percent of the US population had more wealth, political influence, real estate, and Starbucks gift cards than the other 99 percent.  This was perceived as inherently wrong regardless of how the rich came about being rich.  Everyone was convinced that the 1% must have made their riches on the backs of the 99%.

Our group here in Omaha started to organize and decided to attack the inequities in the distribution of wealth and the problem of big business having too much influence over our government.  We went to a couple of events and I think the only way to describe them is anti-climactic.  Everyone marched around for about an hour and then threw their signs in the back of their cars and went home.  Boom.  Done.  No excitement, no civil disobedience, no impact.  We all walked a few blocks and let the local TV stations take our pictures for a 15 second news piece.  There was just no passion.  Once these events were over, the Occupy movement was forgotten for the day.

After this went on for a couple of weeks, I found out about an organizational meeting to be held at a restaurant called McFoster's and decided to go and see if I had any skills that could help the Occupy movement move forward.  During the meeting, the leaders had a spirited discussion and started to form committees and working groups for everything from making signs to deciding where the different groups would meet.  Of course, they also formed a committee whose job was to review all outgoing communications from the Occupy movement.  Then they decided that they needed someone to make some forms to keep track of everything.  They couldn't agree on what forms they needed, so a committee was mobilized.  No less than 20 committees and working groups were formed.  Each one was supposed to have at least one meeting during the next week and elect a chairman, who would report back to the general meeting on behalf of their committee.

The meeting adjourned after about 45 more minutes of debate whether to have the general meeting on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and whether to have it at 7:00PM or 8:00PM and whether to form a committee to provide child care during the meeting and a committee to study whether the child care providers would need a state certification and a committee to secure snacks for the children and a committee to get snacks for the adults and a committee to decide whether they should also provide vegan snacks or if attendees should bring their own vegan snacks and a committee to figure out where everyone was going to park during the meeting and a committee to decide on a logo and a committee to decide whether they should have T-shirts and hoodies printed or just T-shirts and a committee to.... well, you get the idea.

There were several people with clipboards standing by the front door as we all left. In my experience, I've always found that anyone carrying a clipboard was probably bad news and this was no exception.  Each clipboard bearer had lists for each of the dozens of committees and working groups that had been formed during the meeting and they asked us all which committees we wanted to serve on.  Anyone not signing up for at least two committees would be assigned to whichever committee needed a few more members.  When they asked me which committees I wanted to join, I just said "None."  The guy with the Grateful Dead T-shirt and pungent smelling rasta curls asked me why I didn't want to pick my committees and I told him "I'm not coming back.  Over the last 2 hours you have just become exactly what you're protesting against."

After that I didn't hear anything more about Occupy locally.  About a year later I saw them re-post something on Facebook and sent a message asking about the status of the movement.  They responded a few days later that they were "in the process of organizing."  Seriously.