Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (147 of them)
we're the last major-city camp on the eastern seaboard (i'm not counting occupy buffalo, hope friends there will forgive me), and we're approaching our 3 month anniversary.
in the last month we've become more about intracamp politics/issues than that which brought us together to begin with, and that's been frustrating to see; with 200 tents and twice as many people living in a damn park it only makes sense that it would take on all the internal politics of a small town once it got settled.
fights, usually a sidecar to substance abuse among the homeless who've brought their prior issues into the community, have become alarmingly common. tensions are high, and at a time when we're being challenged by weather while trying to have some of our most important existential discussions to date.
a lot of us are trying to start conversations about "2.0," the question of what happens when there are no more tents at the square. there's a faction (as i suspect there's been at every major encampment) that, on discussion of post-occupation tactics, raises the question "post-occupation? how can you TALK like that? what about the people in this camp with no other place to live? where's the place for THEM in your occupy 2.0?"
this position seems to presuppose that camp will continue indefinitely unless we voluntarily tear it down, which strikes me as short-sighted. I also have the luxury of not living at and dealing with the camp 24/7, and i completely understand how someone who made the choice to do that might come to see the continuation of the camp itself as the most important aspect. the camp, though, has always been intended as a means--and i think that to treat it as an end in itself is dangerous in more ways than one.
not really sure what i'm getting at here--maybe the inherent danger of myopia in a community like the one we've brought together, and the consequences of allowing it to remain porous when that openness results in the introduction of elements we're not fully prepared to deal with.
― HOOS aka driver of steen, Tuesday, 20 December 2011 07:58 (twelve years ago) link