Thank you!! 🙏🏻

Occupy laid the groundwork for the understanding of the 1% and the 99%, don't get me wrong. But for all the thousands of people camping and protesting and writing and yelling so little moved the conversation as compared to this single incident (in my opinion).

My question is - what's next? /endrant

While Occupy rallied against the "big banks" there was sadly little it could do to make an impact. In one moment this young man showed that anyone can technically make an impact, even if only a violent one.

The little guys suffer at the hands of the big guys. And we are all the "little guys" here.

(2) This time around I'm astounded by the number of friends sharing memes about the "adjuster" and "our Italian King" - heralding someone who is essentially an assassin for a cause. The reason is that this cause is widely known and it easily translates beyond health care to all areas of inequality.

2. When I proposed researching the Occupy camps I was barely paid any mind by professors or even other students in my urban studies program. Conducting research on this was more of a "protest movements" niche. If folks were involved they marched and chanted and tweeted. Overall the cause was murky.

This is different for two reasons in my mind:
1. The perpetrator of the direct action (technically violence) is not a niche anarchist with a bandana around his face. Though privileged, he is not an extremist outlier. He's pretty normal as far as we can tell so far.

I.e. He's more like "us" than not

What's different this time? Even amongst the outrage of the live feeds ripping people out of tents, throwing laptops and belongings into dumpsters in the middle of the night, chanting at the top of your lungs for someone to listen to the need for change - it was still a "peaceful" occupation tactic.

In the end there was no struggle with the police (unlike other camps famously raided in the middle of the night) and it was peaceful, even voluntarily tearing down the giant campsites with a "celebration". Some policy changed and I came away with a first-hand account of bottom-up urbanism practices.

Even within the site there was a division between typically younger (mostly male) anarchists who wanted more direct action and the strategists who were looking for community building and resource sharing, as well as directly negotiating with the city government around local policy changes.

I, myself, was also at risk spending time at the camp volunteering at the main information tent where supplies were exchanged throughout the camp, donations were received, and strategic planning was centralized. The initial rally was huge and well received but the campers were still niche activists.

I was a grad student at the time doing my Master's in Urban Studies at Portland State University. I got rapid approval because of the tenuous circumstances and because it was an at-risk population, i.e. activists in danger of violence and police action due to technically illegal activity (camping).