Travels and Occupies

By Starhawk | Published: December 28, 2011

Reflections on my Travels

So, for much of December, I was travelling too far, too fast to blog.  Way back last year when I was finishing up the writing of The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, I had some email discussions with the publishers about how to promote it once it came out.  New Society is a small, political publisher, and while they are great to work with, use recycled paper, and support all the right causes, they don’t have money to spend on book tours.  “No problem,” I said.  “I’ll just schedule a few workshops in some key places—like New  York, LA, etc. and that’ll cover the cost of getting there.  Plus I’d rather give a talk or a workshop than sit behind a table at a bookstore desperately hoping someone will come buy the book and have me sign it before I spend far more money than I’m making on all the other books around me in the store.”

So, I had quite a schedule already planned for the Fall, and then half the world decided to go Occupy Everything.  What could be more perfect timing, given that I’d just written a book on horizontal organizing and collaborative process?  Many of my far-flung friends were involved in their local Occupy’s, and soon they were emailing me begging me to come.  People who found out I’d be in their cities were asking for trainings, and since I’m now hooked into national networks of trainers, I ended up going to Vancouver, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, then home for a day—just long enough to do a forum on nonviolence/diversity of tactics for Occupy Oakland—and then LA, plus a Winter Solstice ritual in Sebastopol.  Even for me, this was rather a hectic pace, but it was hella fun and it gave me a quick overview of the movement, like a series of snapshots.

This last month has been a challenging time for the Occupy movement.  The forces of repression have struck hard, and most or all of the major Occupations have been forced out.  At the same time, winter and cold weather make outdoor activities a challenge.  I’ll never forget the stalwart folks of Occupy Minneapolis, valiantly maintaining a presence in 10 degree weather!  My favorite souvenir of the trip—my Occupy MN hat, made of bushy fake fur!  Other memories–Occupy Boston the night eviction was threatened.  An action at Goldman Sachs with Occupy Wall Street–followed by an impromptu spiral dance at the Winter Garden across the street.  A healing ritual at Zucotti Park.  Trainings, trainings, trainings–including one heart-filled workshop my last morning in New York for Occupiers now housed in a church on the West Side.  Here’s some pics:

Occupy Minneapolis--seriously cold!

Occupy Boston resists eviction!

Confronting the giant squid of Goldman Sachs with Occupy Wall Street

But even more than troubles with the cops and city authorities, the biggest challenges the Occupy movement faces seem to be internal.  How do we make decisions together?  How do we resolve our own conflicts within our groups?  Once we’ve said “We are the 99%”, how do we set standards of behavior and say what is okay and what is not?  Once we’ve renounced force and coercion, how do we enforce those standards when we do set them?

None of these are easy questions to answer.  While many of them are addressed in my book—and thank you, Starhawk! For buckling down last spring, meeting your deadlines and getting it finished on time, otherwise you’d be kicking yourself in the butt right now, and you’re no longer limber enough to do so!—the Occupy movement poses them in a form more stark than I’ve ever encountered before, in four decades of horizontal organizing.  Sitting down in the public square to Occupy and protest an unjust system attracted the very people most impacted by the injustice, some of whom are badly wounded in ways that make it very hard to organize and live together.  When your own needs are overwhelming, and unfulfilled, its hard to see that other people might also have needs.  When you’ve had no voice, and somebody offers you a platform to speak and an audience, it can be hard to step back after your allotted two minutes and let others speak.  When you’ve dulled your pain for years with drink or drugs, you can’t easily go cold turkey and stop using.  And yet when you’re trying to create a new society in which everyone has a voice and power is shared, you need everyone to be willing and able to share both power and responsibility.

Consensus is a challenging process at best—when most people are untrained, and even the facilitators don’t really understand how the process is supposed to work, and when the participants aren’t even in the same consensus reality.  Consensus is also a linear thinking process, designed for synthesizing issues into proposals and then making decisions.  It’s a tool, not a group structure nor a way of life. It requires someone with a linear thinking mind to facilitate, who can keep a kind of outline in their head of topics, subtopics, points A B C and D.”  When people come to it with the pent-up anger of years of disempowerment, it can simply compound frustration.  When the voices in your head compel you to tell the world about the impending arrival of the Space Brothers with the Mysterious Blue Geodes and you theory about how it all relates to the Mayan Calendar, being told you’re off topic just doesn’t cut it.

Consensus is one tool—and used well it can be a powerful and empowering tool.  But it’s not the only tool or process we need.  There are other ways of coming together that open the heart or encourage participation in different ways.  Some of them are discussed in the free download on my website: “The Five-Fold Path of Productive Meetings”.  And I hope to do more writing and thinking about this in the days to come.

At Zucotti Park in my Occupy MN hat with Priya Warcry.

And now—got to go pack the truck and head up to the ranch to prepare for our upcoming Earth Activist Training!  Happy holidays, and a blessed New Year to you all!

Posted in Occupy movement, Uncategorized, collaborative groups, political activism | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

My New Book: The Empowerment Manual!

By Starhawk | Published: December 1, 2011

My new book, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups is out in the bookstores now, as well as online, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you all!  Click on the link above to get a peek inside and to download the free supplementary chapter: The Five-Fold Path of Productive Meetings. I’m off on a whirlwind tour, doing workshops and trainings on the book and support for various Occupy movements–see the whole schedule here.

When I began writing The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, I wanted to offer some of the benefit of my experience, including my many mistakes, to groups who were organizing without a top-down, hierarchical structure.  I’ve been living and working in such groups for more than forty years, and I felt like the many dreadful meetings I’ve endured, the in-fights and the painful conflicts, as well as the glorious moments of collective creativity and spiritual ecstasy, should all count for something.  I saw so many groups struggling with the same issues, whether they were spiritual circles, working groups, communities struggling to organize or activists planning a protest.  And I had a few insights that I felt might be helpful.

I didn’t know that half the world would decide, right when the book is coming out, to go sit in the public square and organize leaderless Occupations governed by consensus-based General Assemblies.  The Occupy movement springs from many of the same sources that inspired the book—the horizontally organized global justice movement of the last decades and its antecedents, the anti-nuclear and anti-intervention movements of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties.  But now more people than ever before are suddenly immersed in the joys and challenges of organizing non-hierarchically.

Groups without formal hierarchy are potentially empowering on a mass scale. Unfortunately, we come into them from a lifetime of exposure to hierarchy, with its patterns internalized.  We have few models and fewer guidebooks to help us learn how to do it a different way.  There are thousands of books on how to be a manager or a CEO of a corporation, virtually none about how to walk the delicate line of stepping up to a leadership role in a leaderless group.

Collaborative groups are a different species from hierarchical groups, and understanding those differences can help us make them work more effectively.  As kids, when we get in a fight Mom or Dad can step in and say, “You two, break it up!”  In a top-down group, the boss or leader steps in for Dad.  But when we remove that authority, there’s no one to say, “Okay, time out.  Now apologize to each other, kiss and make up.”  Conflicts can be harder to resolve, unless we realize that the group itself must find clear agreements on how to handle conflict and how to support one another in directly and creatively solving our disputes.

Communication is more complex in a collaborative group.  In a hierarchy, there’s a chain of command.  You know whom to report to, and who reports to you.  But in a collective, ten of us might make a decision—forgetting that member number eleven is home sick with stomach flu.  Maybe we also forget to inform Number Eleven of our decision—and then forget that we’ve forgotten.  Number Eleven discovers we’ve set a key policy without her, and feels hurt and slighted.  It’s clear to her that we’ve deliberately left her out of the loop, as we always do!  Painful meetings and hours of mediation could all be avoided if we’d simply thought to ask, at the end of our meeting, “Who else needs to be informed of this and who is going to tell them?”

The Occupy movement faces some of the greatest challenges I’ve ever encountered around group dynamics and group process—it’s so huge,grew up so fast and so spontaneously and found itself smack in the middle of some of society’s worst unsolved problems.  Former student body presidents are encamped in the midst of raving drunks, trying to come to consensus in large groups.  It’s fascinating, often exasperating, and that’s why I’m spending as much time as I can offering trainings.

I also offer the book as a resource.  I recommend it because it contains insights and a framework that can help groups function, whether they are unwieldy Occupations or tight circles of friends engaged in a project.  I know this because it has helped me—although presumably I already knew what’s in it.  But reading, researching and pulling the lessons together into a coherent form has helped me become a better group member and a more effective mediator.

If you’re working in any sort of collaborative group, you’ll find valuable insights in The Empowerment Manual. I say this not just to get you to buy the book—although of course I want you to buy it, that will help a very wonderful small, political publisher stay in business and will buy me some time to write a sequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing, my next project.  But far more than that, I’m hoping you’ll read the book, work with it, use it, improve on it, and find your own groups working more effectively, and our common work to build a better world will thrive.

“To choose a positive future, we need the imagination, the commitment and passion that can never be commanded but can only be unleashed in groups of equals. Those groups need to work and function well. That’s why I’ve written this book.”

The book is out in bookstores now, and available online through my website, New Society, and of course, on Amazon and elsewhere.  Check out the New Society blog about it here.

Some of my older books have also become newly relevant with the rise of the Occupy movement, especially for anyone interested in its antecedents.  In particular, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics and Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery look at the internal wounds we carry from millennia of war, hierarchy and patriarchy, and reflect some of the horizontal organizing in the antinuclear and anti-itntervention movements of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties.  Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising tracks the global justice movement from the Seattle blockade of the WTO in 1999 through September 11, and contains nuanced discussions of nonviolence, diversity, and spirit.  Find them all here!

I doubt I’ll have time to blog in the next few weeks, but I’m sure I’ll have lots to ponder from my travels.  Hope to see some of you on the road!

Posted in Occupy movement, books and writing, collaborative groups, political activism | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

An Open Letter to the Occupy Movement: Why We Need Agreements

By Starhawk | Published: November 9, 2011

Alliance of Community Trainers is the training collective I work with.  Here’s our statement to the Occupy movement on questions of violence, nonviolence and strategy:

From the Alliance of Community Trainers, ACT

The Occupy movement has had enormous successes in the short time since September when activists took over a square near Wall Street. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of active participants, spawned occupations in cities and towns all over North America, changed the national dialogue and garnered enormous public support. It’s even, on occasion, gotten good press!

Now we are wrestling with the question that arises again and again in movements for social justice—how to struggle. Do we embrace nonviolence, or a ‘diversity of tactics?’ If we are a nonviolent movement, how do we define nonviolence? Is breaking a window violent?

We write as a trainers’ collective with decades of experience, from the anti-Vietnam protests of the sixties through the strictly nonviolent antinuclear blockades of the seventies, in feminist, environmental and anti-intervention movements and the global justice mobilizations of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. We embrace many labels, including feminist, anti-racist, eco-feminist and anarchist. We have many times stood shoulder to shoulder with black blocs in the face of the riot cops, and we’ve been tear-gassed, stun-gunned, pepper sprayed, clubbed, and arrested,

While we’ve participated in many actions organized with a diversity of tactics, we do not believe that framework is workable for the Occupy Movement. Setting aside questions of morality or definitions of ‘violence’ and ‘nonviolence’ – for no two people define ‘violence’ in the same way – we ask the question:

What framework can we organize in that will build on our strengths, allow us to grow, embrace a wide diversity of participants, and make a powerful impact on the world?

‘Diversity of tactics’ becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions.

The Occupy movement includes people from a broad diversity of backgrounds, life experiences and political philosophies. Some of us want to reform the system and some of us want to tear it down and replace it with something better. Our one great point of agreement is our call for transparency and accountability. We stand against the corrupt institutions that broker power behind closed doors. We call to account the financial manipulators that have bilked billions out of the poor and the middle classes.

Just as we call for accountability and transparency, we ourselves must be accountable and transparent. Some tactics are incompatible with those goals, even if in other situations they might be useful, honorable or appropriate. We can’t be transparent behind masks. We can’t be accountable for actions we run away from. We can’t maintain the security culture necessary for planning and carrying out attacks on property and also maintain the openness that can continue to invite in a true diversity of new people. We can’t make alliances with groups from impacted communities, such as immigrants, if we can’t make agreements about what tactics we will employ in any given action.

The framework that might best serve the Occupy movement is one of strategic nonviolent direct action. Within that framework, Occupy groups would make clear agreements about which tactics to use for a given action. This frame is strategic—it makes no moral judgments about whether or not violence is ever appropriate, it does not demand we commit ourselves to a lifetime of Gandhian pacifism, but it says, ‘This is how we agree to act together at this time.’ It is active, not passive. It seeks to create a dilemma for the opposition, and to dramatize the difference between our values and theirs.

Strategic nonviolent direct action has powerful advantages:

We make agreements about what types of action we will take, and hold one another accountable for keeping them. Making agreements is empowering. If I know what to expect in an action, I can make a choice about whether or not to participate. While we can never know nor control how the police will react, we can make choices about what types of action we stand behind personally and are willing to answer for. We don’t place unwilling people in the position of being held responsible for acts they did not commit and do not support.

In the process of coming to agreements, we listen to each other’s differing viewpoints. We don’t avoid disagreements within our group, but learn to debate freely, passionately, and respectfully.

We organize openly, without fear, because we stand behind our actions. We may break laws in service to the higher laws of conscience. We don’t seek punishment nor admit the right of the system to punish us, but we face the potential consequences for our actions with courage and pride.

Because we organize openly, we can invite new people into our movement and it can continue to grow. As soon as we institute a security culture in the midst of a mass movement, the movement begins to close in upon itself and to shrink.

Holding to a framework of nonviolent direct action does not make us ‘safe.’ We can’t control what the police do and they need no direct provocation to attack us. But it does let us make clear decisions about what kinds of actions we put ourselves at risk for.

Nonviolent direct action creates dilemmas for the opposition, and clearly dramatizes the difference between the corrupt values of the system and the values we stand for. Their institutions enshrine greed while we give away food, offer shelter, treat each person with generosity. They silence dissent while we value every voice. They employ violence to maintain their system while we counter it with the sheer courage of our presence.

Lack of agreements privileges the young over the old, the loud voices over the soft, the fast over the slow, the able-bodied over those with disabilities, the citizen over the immigrant, white folks over people of color, those who can do damage and flee the scene over those who are left to face the consequences.

Lack of agreements and lack of accountability leaves us wide open to provocateurs and agents. Not everyone who wears a mask or breaks a window is a provocateur. Many people clearly believe that property damage is a strong way to challenge the system. And masks have an honorable history from the anti-fascist movement in Germany and the Zapatista movement in Mexico, who said “We wear our masks to be seen.”

But a mask and a lack of clear expectations create a perfect opening for those who do not have the best interests of the movement at heart, for agents and provocateurs who can never be held to account. As well, the fear of provocateurs itself sows suspicion and undercuts our ability to openly organize and grow.

A framework of strategic nonviolent direct action makes it easy to reject provocation. We know what we’ve agreed to—and anyone urging other courses of action can be reminded of those agreements or rejected.

We hold one another accountable not by force or control, ours or the systems, but by the power of our united opinion and our willingness to stand behind, speak for, and act to defend our agreements.

A framework of strategic nonviolent direct action agreements allows us to continue to invite in new people, and to let them make clear choices about what kinds of tactics and actions they are asked to support.

There’s plenty of room in this struggle for a diversity of movements and a diversity of organizing and actions. Some may choose strict Gandhian nonviolence, others may choose fight-back resistance. But for the Occupy movement, strategic nonviolent direct action is a framework that will allow us to grow in diversity and power.

From the Alliance of Community Trainers, ACT

Starhawk

Lisa Fithian

Lauren Ross (or Juniper)

To comment or endorse this statement, got to:

http://trainersalliance.org/

Posted in Occupy movement, political activism, social justice | Tagged , , , , | 15 Comments

The Poetics of the Street

By Starhawk | Published: October 28, 2011

October 27, 2011

If the Goddess had wanted me to lead the revolution, she would have given me a loud voice.  Since she didn’t, I have to assume she just wants me to wheeze along, doing what I can.  Yesterday that was sort of an Occupy marathon.  I went down to #Occupy Santa Cruz in the open convertible of a curly-headed forty-something anarchist named Wes, talking at the top of our lungs about all the issues at Occupy Santa Cruz, which are similar to all the issues at the other Occupy sites.

Occupy Santa Cruz has a sweet site at the courthouse, with a camp in the park, information booths at the steps, a porta-pottie, and a grassy area on the side that was relatively quiet, where I did trainings all afternoon, a mix of nonviolent direct action, facilitation, and then a short talk at 5 pm, to which many people came out from the community, including some dear friends like writer Vicki Noble and others from Diablo Canyon blockade days.  Then I helped them facilitate their General Assembly, which may go down on record as the shortest, most efficient GA ever—no thanks to me as I really did very little.  Occupy Santa Cruz has a warm, family feel, and seems very well grounded.  Tehya, the young woman who called the meeting that sparked the encampment, like many of these young activists had never done anything like it before.  But she got inspired by pictures of Occupy Wall Street, and she thought, “I can put up a Facebook page.”  And then, “Oh, I’ve just called for a General Assembly and I’ve never seen one, I better go up to San Francisco and see what it’s like.”  Less than a month later, the Occupation is in full swing.

By the end of the meeting, we’re getting live feed from #Occupy Oakland where 3000 people are having a General Assembly.  They’ve retaken Oscar Grant plaza and have taken down the barricades.  We head up to the city.  I’m tempted to go to Oakland, but need to stop home first to drop my stuff and I suspect by the time I do I’ll be more tempted to stay home for some well-deserved rest.  But on the way up we start getting texts telling us to come to SF, that they are expecting a police raid between 10 and midnight.

So instead I change my shoes, strap on my action waist pack (complete with rescue remedy and a spare pair of glasses) and head down to #Occupy San Francisco.   As I get in the car, I hear that they are being raided, but when we get there, the police have not yet come.

Hundreds of people are massed in the corner of the square, and a young African-American woman with a bullhorn is leading them in a nonviolence training.  I’ve never seen her before but I love her instantly, she’s so calm and strong and confident as she organizes people into rows, sitting down in front, standing behind.  David Solnit is crouched in one of the lines—he’s been down at the occupation a lot in the last weeks, training and organizing, and I give him much credit, along with others who have devoted time to helping this occupation, for the feeling of strength and determination in the plaza.  Just a week or so ago, Occupy SF was beleaguered and dispirited from constant police raids, more like a huddle of tarps and blankets on the edge of Market Street in front of the Federal Reserve.  Then they moved onto Justin Hermann Plaza, took more space, defied the ban on tents and raised their banners.

And tonight, it’s beautiful!  I’m seeing friends in the crowd that I’ve been on blockades with since Diablo Canyon in 1981, amidst a sea of new people, young, old, a wide diversity of backgrounds and colors and attire, from punk anarchists to business suits.  The plaza is filled with a palpable aura of strong, calm, joyful resistance, nonviolence at its best.  People are preparing to stand their ground—not to fight the cops or bait them, but to hold firm and stand together and defend our space and our right to be there.  There’s a power in that plaza that is deep and strong, and because the moral ground is so clear, we’ve pulled in people from all walks of life to a movement that has room to grow.

Marion beckons to me from the midst of the seated group.  We’ve been friends for thirty years or more and would be good street buddies, but I shake my head.  I might get arrested, but damn if I’m going to sit down on the cold concrete until I see the whites of their eyes.

Instead, Paradox and I entertain the troops, which he does supremely well.  We go with the group to the far end of the plaza, where we run some drills, getting mock cops to rush the lines.  The people stand strong!  I teach my quick version of activist grounding.  Riyana and Jason have their drums. and the Brass Liberation Orchestra comes around to play.  Nothing like a brass band on the street to raise the energy!

Hours go by.  Rumors fly.  The cops are massing a mile away.  They’re piling into paddy wagons and busses, dressed in riot gear.  BART officials have shut down 12th St. Oakland and Embarcadero stations to prevent Occupy Oakland from joining us.  Instead, protestors have taken the Bay Bridge.

But the cops don’t come.  Instead, five of our city supervisors come down to join us.  They hold a press conference to express their solidarity.

Determination is still strong, but energy is beginning to flag.  Paradox leads a group in some stretching.  I suggest asking people to say why they are here, using the people’s mike, where the crowd repeats what you say.  There’s a moment of hesitation, then an older man speaks.

“I was forced to retire early…”

“I WAS FORCED TO RETIRE EARLY…”

“My health care costs…”

“MY HEALT CARE COSTS…”

“Eleven hundred dollars a month…”

“ELEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS A MONTH…”

“On my pension….”

“ON MY PENSION…”

“I can afford…”

“I CAN AFFORD…”

“Only health care, rent…”

“ONLY HEALTH CARE, RENT…”

“And half the food I need.”

“AND HALF THE FOOD I NEED.”

“Mike check,” calls a young woman.

“MIKE CHECK.”

“I have two BA’s….”

“I HAVE TWO BA’S…”

“And tens of thousands of dollars of debt…”

“AND TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF DEBT…”

“I have a part-time job…”

“I HAVE A PART-TIME JOB…”

“As a nanny…”

“AS A NANNY…”

“That doesn’t use…”

“THAT DOESN’T USE…”

“My education…”

“MY EDUCATION…”

“I am the 99%!”

“I AM THE 99%”

“Mike check,” cries a young man.

“MIKE CHECK.”

“I’m here because…”

“I’M HERE BECAUSE…”

“When I went to my comfortable job…”

“WHEN I WENT TO MY COMFORTABLE JOB…”

“This morning, and saw…”

“THIS MORNING, AND SAW…”

“Pictures of the Oakland cops…”

“PICTURES OF THE OAKLAND COPS…”

“Lobbing flash grenades…”

“LOBBING FLASH GRENADES…”

“Into a group trying to help…”

“INTO A GROUP TRYING TO HELP…”

“The injured vet…”

“THE INJURED VET…”

“Who was shot in the head…”
“WHO WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD…”

“I got so mad…”

“I GOT SO MAD…”
“I walked out of work…”

“I WALKED OUT OF WORK….”

“And brought my whole office with me.”

“AND BROUGHT MY WHOLE OFFICE WITH ME!”

The stories go on and on for hours, the circle moving and shifting to face each speaker, to put them at center.  Echoed by the crowd, each story becomes our own story, a poem, a choral theater of the streets.

I’ve been on my feet all day, but I don’t feel tired.  I’m exhilarated.  What’s happening here is so beautiful, so powerful.  It answers our most primal human needs: to have a voice, to have that voice heard and affirmed, to tell your story, to be seen, to be part of something, to stand for something, to stand together, to stand strong.

I could stay in that moment forever.  But sometime after 2 AM, someone evidently brings some kryptonite onto the plaza and my super-powers desert me.  I return to being a sixty-year-old woman who has been talking all day in a wheezy voice.  My intuition tells me that the crisis has passed, and I go home.

Later in the night, the police send the demonstrators a letter, saying that the raid has been called off.  Essentially, it admits that there are more of us than there are of them.  They can see the strength, the determination and the discipline of this crowd.  Arresting us all would be a long and grueling process for the police.  Dispersing us with clubs and tear gas would be a PR disaster for the Mayor who is fighting an election in just a few days.  We have succeeded in creating a dilemma for the powers that be, and they back off.

Now a day or two has passed.  Across the bay, Mayor Jean Quan has recognized how disastrous a mistake it was to let the cops turn Oakland into a war zone.  They have indeed shot an Iraq veteran in the head with some sort of projectile, and the internet bleeds with photos of his wounds.  When he collapsed in a cloud of tear gas, other protestors came to his aid, and the police did indeed shoot flash grenades into their midst—also caught on video.  It’s a crime that has disgusted the nation.  Quan backpeddles furiously, and Occupy Oakland retakes Oscar Grant plaza.  The power of nonviolent resistance has won!  For the moment….

Posted in Occupy movement, political activism | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Return to Oakland

By Starhawk | Published: October 26, 2011

I’m sure I’m starting to sound like the world’s most curmudgeonly activist, but there I am at 4 pm yesterday, October 25, standing at the rally at the Oakland library reflecting on how much I hate rallies.  My feet hurt and I’m thinking about the Monty Python movie of The Life of Brian where Jesus is giving the Sermon on the Mount and no one in the back of the crowd can hear him.

“Did he say ‘ Blessed are the cheesemakers?  What’s so great about the cheesemakers?”

The only thing I hate worse than rallies is not having rallies.  And I’m glad we’re having this one, and glad I’m here, aching feet and all.  Because it’s the necessary response to the brutal police attack on #Occupy Oakland.  At 4 AM, the police surrounded the camp.  According to reports, they ringed the square, fired tear gas canisters and sound bombs into the sleeping crowd, and then arrested over a hundred people, who are being held in custody for two days until their arraignment.

The tents are gone, the free school, library, medic tent, food tents—all trashed, the whole village with it’s straw mulch and pallet walkways, the site which of all I’ve seen most successfully created a mini-society of its own.  Gone, in a late-night raid by armed riot cops using chemical weapons against sleeping people.

The crowd tonight is angry, rightfully so.  Oakland has a shameful history of police brutality and outright murder, especially against African-Americans.  The encampment was named after Oscar Grant, executed by a BART policeman as he lay face-down on the ground.  This is not a crowd who believes that the police are our friends—even though they should be.  We’re fighting for their pensions, for the schools their kids go to, for their medical care.  I hear that Oakland brought in police from many different outlying precincts and neighboring cities for the raid, and then sent them home.

At last the rally becomes a march, and we move out.  I lose track of my friends but I feel confident that in a crowd of thousands of Bay Area folks, I’ll find other people I know.

There’s a moment, sometimes, on a march where the united movement of the crowd, the chants, the sense of outrage and power become a flow that carries you along like the current of a great river.  Your feet stop hurting, your old bones no longer ache, you become strong and young and feel immortal, part of a great torrent that will sweep away injustice and cleanse the land.  I’m carried by the river, and we march and march, down to the jail, over again to Oscar Grant plaza, on and on.

People are angry, some of them so angry they lose all sense of self-preservation, pushing up to the riot cops, practically pressing themselves against their shields, yelling in their faces.  I share the anger but I believe it’s the job of old women to inject a measure of calm and common sense into such situations, so I join with a couple of younger men who are attempting to move the crowd on.  While I personally would prefer a more disciplined nonviolence that might attempt to de-escalate the police violence and remind them that our issues are indeed theirs, I understand the visceral urge to yell and scream.  But do it a few rows back, if you must, out of range of their jabbing batons and snatching arms.  The cops start shoving and swinging, and a young woman gets knocked into me so hard that I get pushed down.  Luckily a big, strong woman right next to me bellows “Get her up” and hauls me back up onto my feet.  Not that I can’t get up on my own—but it’s more of a project than it used to be.  And then the march moves on.

I finally Keith Hennessy, the wonderful dancer and performance artist who is also my next-door neighbor.  Keith and I take a long, hard look at the riot cops at Oscar Grant plaza.  “Where do we want to be?” I ask.  “I either like to be right up at the front, where I can maybe influence things, or somewhere with a good escape route.”

“And not six rows back!” Keith agrees.

We go up to the front.  The cops are tense, their body language like snarling dogs, ready to attack.  We hear them issue a warning over the bullhorn, ordering people to disperse.  We decide to go for the escape route—and find Jason with a big snare drum and another friend with a saxophone.  Someone asks us to help lead the group down the street, and that seems like a wiser idea to us than staying in the intersection until the riot begins, so we march off down the street, drumming, and the crowd follows.

We march on and on, again.  “Where are we going?” someone asks.  “I have no idea!”  I answer.  The march resembles the movement—full of spirit and courage alive in the moment, but without yet a clear destination.  Where are we going?  We’re making it up as we go along.

Eventually we reach Snow Park, the site of the second Oakland Occupation which was also dismantled early in the morning.  We stop there and the group holds a general assembly.  I am starting to remember that I am a sixty year old woman with sore feet and asthma, and my instincts are all telling me its time to go.  Jason and I leave to go to a report back on our DC actions we’d planned long before the raid.

At home, watching the news, I see the clouds of tear gas.  A young veteran has been hit in the head by a police projectile and bears a horrific wound.  Tear gas billows around a woman in a wheelchair.  Downtown Oakland looks like a war zone.

Why?  To prevent people assembling in the public square, meeting, talking, protesting injustice, struggling to invent a different way, going back to the roots of democracy.  Is that such a threat?

Evidently so.

Jean Quan is the Mayor of Oakland.  Her number is 510 238 3141.  You know what to do.

Posted in political activism | Tagged , | 12 Comments

Occupy Oakland

By Starhawk | Published: October 18, 2011

Yesterday Paradox and I went down to #Occupy Oakland—really inspiring!  It’s like a small village in front of City Hall, with tents crammed together, a big kitchen, a media tent, a library and Free School, a long list of meetings for each day, a calendar for the week—really a model of how these things might go.  The ground was layered with straw to keep down mud and pathways were laid with pallets.  There’s an ampitheater built into the plaza, where a beautiful young woman was singing on a good sound system.  A few of us were talking and noticed an older, African-American man sitting in a lawn chair kind of at our feet.  We expanded our circle to include him, and he smiled.

“I ain’t getting up,” he said, smiling.  “I’m tired.  I’m old.  My feet are tired.  But I’m happy.  This is beautiful.  People getting together, peaceful.  There’s a whole lot of healing goin’ on here.  People getting off drugs, alcohol.   Working together.”

“You make me happy,” I said.  “I want to hug you or something.”

“Hug me!”  he stood up for that, and we hugged.

We stayed for some of the General Assembly.   They did something at the beginning that I really like—an hour of what they call the Forum.  The facilitators pose a question, and people break into small groups to talk about it.  Then they open the mike for the rest of the hour for people to speak.  The question was about how we can respect ourselves and one another, and the speakers were the best theater I’ve seen in a long time, each one different:  the grinning young Asian American woman who tells us that smiling is a revolutionary act, the red-haired older woman who urges us to listen to one another, the graying leftist who exhorts us to get back to why we’re here and organize the working classes, the angy young man from the Black Panther Party who says he’s disgusted with the whole thing, that real revolution is about bloodshed and long prison sentences, and names the brothers who are still in prison from the sixties.  And many people who make simple, sensible suggestions for improving the camp, from picking up garbage to connecting with your neighbors.  Everyone gets a hearing.  And because the Forum is relieved from the necessity to make decisions, we can disagree, and listen, and take what is of value to each of us while leaving the rest.

Meanwhile I’m on the phone with a friend at Wall Street asking for advice about dealing with the drummers who won’t stop drumming and are driving the neighbors crazy—the ones who have been supportive and who persuaded Bloomberg not to evict them but who might soon change their minds.  I’m reading reports from around the country of people struggling with the same issues—how do we embrace diversity?  How do we scale up direct democracy?  How do we hold meetings that are open to everyone yet efficient enough that they don’t drive everyone out of their minds?

Meanwhile, on Sunday night the police in riot gear raided #Occupy San Francisco and confiscated most of their gear.  They have constantly been harassed and raided, and I am at a loss to explain why my own city, arguably one of the most progressive towns in the USA, is so bent on disrupting a peaceful protest.  I will do my best to get down there today and offer some support.

Posted in political activism, social justice | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

The Truth About Lisa Fithian

By Starhawk | Published: October 17, 2011

Friday, October 14.  I come back from two days on the ranch, where some rodent had chewed up the internet cables, and learned that Fox News had done a hit piece on Occupy Wall Street and targeted my dear friend Lisa Fithian.

What do you do when a friend is slimed by Fox News?  If you respond, do you simply feed the venom?  But if you don’t respond, do their lies stand, unchallenged?  Or is it a badge of honor to be called out by Fox, however nasty it feels?

I’m not sure what the most strategic course of action is.  But I can’t stand by in silence when a good friend is smeared.  So I want to put on record some of what I know about Lisa Fithian.

I first met Lisa in Seattle, in the run-up to the 1999 blockade of the World Trade Organization.  I saw her across a sea of young, dread-locked activists in the warehouse we used as a convergence center.  Lisa was facilitating the meeting, smiling, cheering, moving like a dancer, infusing the group with her energy and positive vision.  “Wow,” I thought, “I could do that!”  My own style of facilitation was much more low-key, neutral, dull.  But in a crowd that size, I saw instantly that her style was much more effective.  That was the first thing Lisa taught me—but not the last.

A few days later, we met in jail.  In some of the interminable shuffling and transferring of groups, we ended up together for a short time, and had a moment to meet and talk.  I liked her instantly—she was smart and funny.  I had showed up a few days early to help with trainings, but Lisa was one of the core organizers for the blockade, and I was struck with the depth of her insights into the strategy. But we ended up in separate cell blocks, and that was the end of our conversations for the moment.

We met up again in Washington, DC, at the April blockade of the IMF/World Bank.  Later that year, I and Hilary McQuie decided to form a training collective.  Hillary had also been a core organizer in Seattle, and she suggested we ask Lisa to join.  We created Root Activist Network of Trainers, or RANT, which later became Alliance of Community Trainers, or ACT.  http://www.trainersalliance.org/.

The following spring, Lisa and I trained groups together in Quebec City for the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.  We ran together through streets choked with tear gas, helping to maneuver a Pagan cluster of up to ninety people and an unwieldy giant water puppet through streets that resembled a war zone, offering our energy, our impromptu rituals and spiral dances.  At the end of a long, exhausted day, Lisa was still eager to go out and see what was happening.  I realized that I’d finally met someone who had far more energy and stamina than me!

Lisa and I have now worked together, trained together, and run in the streets together for over a decade.  I continue to learn from her.  For one thing, she is far more courageous than I am by nature, willing to push the edges.  In New York City in early 2002, we helped to organize a march against the World Economic Forum which met in New York after 911.  All the usual union groups and progressive groups were scared to organize in the climate of fear after the attacks, but some of the local anarchists managed to pull together a legal, permitted march.  But on the day, the police controlled the space, ‘kettling’ people by fencing us off block by block and holding groups for long periods of time.  A planned rally was abandoned.  Dispirited, our Pagan Cluster retired to the Food Court at Grand Central.  A group of the local organizers found us there and asked us to come upstairs and help them create a spiral dance.  We trooped up, and began spiraling and singing:

“We will never, never lose our way,

To the well of liberty.

And the power of her living flame,

It will rise, it will rise again.”

I was drumming and leading the spiral, Lisa at my side.  After a turn or two, I was ready to stop.

“Keep spiraling,” she hissed.

“I’m on probation,” I reminded her.

“Just keep spiraling,” she insisted.

So we did.  I looked up at one point and realized we had invoked a perfect circle of riot cops.  We had hundreds of activists in the spiral, and commuters hanging off the balconies, watching.  Finally, one of the security guards had had enough.  He waded in, throwing his hands up in frustration.  We took that as our cue, raised our arms and turned the chant into a long, solid tone, a cone of power.  In the stillness as it died away, a woman began to sing “Amazing Grace.”  Hundreds of voices took up the melody, and it echoed back from the starry vault above our heads.  “I needed that,” one of the police murmured as we ended.

So many stories!  For more than ten years, I’ve been in situations with Lisa ranging from the absurb to the terrifying, from the inspiring to the devastating.  In the last few years, my focus has shifted somewhat, to other kinds of teaching and writing.  But Lisa has kept on teaching, training and organizing.  She has helped janitors to bargain for better pay, and students to organize their college campuses.  She’s mentored anti-nuclear activists at Los Alamos and made alliances with indigenous groups defending their lands from contamination. She’s worked with all kinds of people from all walks of life.  In the last years, she and others have worked tirelessly to help ordinary people organize campaigns against the corrupt banks and greedy financial institutions.  While no one person can claim credit for Occupy Wall Street, Lisa has certainly made a huge contribution.  The thousands of young activists that she’s trained and inspired bring a level of skill and understanding to the movement that surely have helped it grow and spread.

Lisa trains people to confront abusive power with nonviolence.  She believes in the power of ordinary people to organize, take action, and change the systems that oppress them, and works tirelessly to support such efforts wherever she finds them.

Her work hasn’t brought her a big car, a fancy house or even a pension and a retirement plan.  It has brought her the satisfaction of knowing she’s made a difference, that she’s put her life at the service of justice, and because of her work, there’s a bit more of it around.

She’s no saint.  She can be pig-headed stubborn, and we’ve had our arguments over the years.  But I want her by my side, when it all comes down.

Here’s what I’ve learned from her:

Think about the whole.  Anticipate needs, and how to fill them.  Be strategic.  Push the edges in the cause of justice.  Take space boldly, and hold your ground.  Take action not just from anger at injustice, but out of love for all you cherish.  Never waver in your faith that we, the ordinary people of the world, can shape our fate and take our future into our own hands.  Just keep spiraling!

In the end, no lies or smears can stand against the power of love brought into action.  Lisa lives her love, every day, and so we love her back, and that love stands as a shield of protection and a beacon of truth.

I’m so proud to be her friend.

Lisa’s website is http://organizingforpower.wordpress.com/

ACT’s website is http://trainersalliance.org/

Posted in Uncategorized, political activism, social justice | 10 Comments

Short Consensus Summary

By Starhawk | Published: October 11, 2011

One of the great needs I see in the Occupy movement is for better meeting facilitation and consensus training.  I’m posting this short handout here–there’s a longer one available at my main website.

Understanding Consensus:

All over the country, people are flocking to the streets to join occupations demanding a just system for the 99%.  It’s an inspiring vision: thousands of people participating in direct democracy, making decisions, having their voices heard.  And it’s a potential nightmare—thousands of ordinary Americans being subjected to really bad, ponderous consensus meetings, fleeing in frustration and anguish and ready to accept any tyranny over the prospect of more long meetings!

Consensus process can be wonderful—or terrible.  At it’s best, it can be empowering, creative and efficient.  But for that to happen, people need to understand and agree upon the process.  Facilitators need training and skill.  And the group as a whole needs to invest some trust in the facilitation team.  If no one in the group has experience with consensus, get training.  If you can’t find training, at least form a facilitators working group to find ways to practice and refine the process and to think about meetings beforehand.  Or just vote.

Why Consensus?

Consensus is a creative thinking process: When we vote, we decide between two alternatives.   With consensus, we take an issue, hear the range of enthusiasm, ideas and concerns about it, and synthesize a proposal that best serves everybody’s vision.

Consensus values every voice: The care we take in a consensus process to hear everyone’s opinions and weave them into a whole is a living demonstration that each one of us is important.  It’s a counter to systems that tell us some people count while others don’t.  In consensus, everyone matters.  But for consensus to work, we must also be flexible, willing to let go.  Consensus means you get your say—it doesn’t mean you get your way!

Consensus creates a sense of unity: When we all participate in shaping a course of action, we all feel a sense of commitment and responsibility.  Unity is not unanimity—within consensus there is room for disagreement, for objections, reservations, for people to stand aside and not participate.

Talking vs. Talking about Talking

People are eager to talk to one another—about politics, about plans of action, about what we learn each day in the occupation.  That’s talking—with real content.  But people get really bored and frustrated when we’re talking about talking—deciding which agenda items should come first, or whether or not to break down into small groups, or how long to take for lunch.  Consensus works best when the group invests some trust in the facilitators to make judgment calls that smooth the process and allow the group to get to the talking.  It bogs down when we are talking about talking.

Hand Signals:

Groups often use hand signals to simplify discussion.  The most common is finger-wiggling or ‘twinkling’, which originated from American Sign Language for applause, and signifies approval.  It allows a group to signify support quickly.

Many groups use additional signals which I won’t attempt to categorize here.  Make sure they are visible, and that everyone knows what they mean.  Too many signals become confusing and alienate new people.

Roles:

Facilitators: The facilitators guide the process, keep people on track, and decide how to facilitate each item.  They balance the need to hear every voice with the need to keep moving forward.  Facilitation of big meetings is a skill and training and practice are needed.  Facilitators need the support of the group to do their job.  Big meetings are best served by having cofacilitators. Facilitators remain neutral and do not take a position on the issues.

Stack taker: Keeps track of who wants to speak, and takes names or gives people numbers.

Notetakers and Scribes: Note takers keep the minutes of the meeting, being especially careful to record any decisions made.  Scribes may write up crucial information large so everyone can see it.

Timekeeper: The timekeeper keeps track of time and of how long we are taking for each agenda item, and alerts the group when it runs over time.

Dragons: Guard the boundaries of the meeting and run interference with those who might distract or interrupt:  drunks wandering in, police, etc.

Straw Polls and Temperature Readings:

Full consensus takes time and energy. Save it for important issues.  For simple decisions and process questions, use straw polls—quick, non-binding votes, or temperature readings—are we in favor of this, neutral or disapproving.  Democracy is not served by trying to get a large group to do a full consensus process on every detail of a meeting—for people who have limited time and energy will leave and be denied their opportunity to weigh in on important issues.

Running the Meeting:

Set an agenda and choose facilitators beforehand:

For big meetings and general assemblies, collect agenda items beforehand so the facilitators have time to think about a logical order for the agenda, and how to approach each item.  There can always be room on the agenda for new items, but setting a full agenda in a huge group will take lots of time that could otherwise be used for actually talking about the items.  Some things commonly on agendas for general assemblies:  Welcome, reports from working groups and committees, action reports, next action planning, etc.

Welcome people.

Present the agenda, ask for any additional items, and ask for approval with a simple straw poll or temperature reading:  ‘twinkles’ or thumbs up or down.  If a lot of additional items come up, ask people to bring them up to the co-facilitator to set an order.  DO NOT let the whole group discuss the order or the times—ask their permission for the facilitators to do this service so the group can discuss issues.

Review how the process works:

When many people are new to consensus, it’s worth spending some time to review how the process works and to clarify any misconceptions.

Issues:

Present the issue:  Someone, NOT the facilitators, tell the group what’s under discussion. What information do we all need to know?

Discuss the issue:

Facilitators call for enthusiasm (sometimes with ‘twinkles’), support, additional ideas, concerns, reservations, strong feelings, moral objections.  Out of discussion a proposal emerges.

Decide the issue:

Someone makes a proposal that synthesizes the sense of the group that arises from the discussion.  A proposal is an action statement:  We will do ______.

The facilitator asks for a show of support, then for new concerns, or friendly amendments.  The proposal can be tweaked and refined to accept additions ( or reject them) and to meet concerns.

Call for consensus:

Restate the proposal in its final form.

Ask for a show of support.

Ask for any unheard concerns, reservations or objections which can be stated for the record.

Ask for any stand asides—meaning “I won’t participate but I won’t block.”

Ask for any blocks.  Blocking consensus does not mean “I disagree”, it means “This proposal is so counter to our founding principles that I cannot let the group go forward.”  When discussion is done well, objections this strong will come up much earlier and blocking is rarely an issue.  Some groups may use a modified form of consensus—meaning that a 90% vote (or another number the group chooses) can override a block.

Celebrate!

Restate the proposal, record it, and decide who will implement it, and who will communicate the decision to others who need to know.

Announcements:

People always want to make announcements, and they often can go on and on and become a huge energy sink.  Big sheets of paper where people can write up details can help with this.

Soap Box:

People love to make statements and speeches.  When time allows, setting a time at the end of the agenda for people to do this can help keep other discussions on track.

Evaluate and close the meeting:

Take a few moments at the end to evaluate how the meeting went.

Don’t confuse the tool with the result:

Any process we use is a tool to help us achieve the goals of empowerment, creativity and unity.  If the tool isn’t working, whether it’s a hand signal, the ‘people’s mike’, or consensus itself, whether it was invented at Occupy Wall Street or has been used for thirty years in the movement, do something different.

More Resources:

Experienced facilitators have many other tools in their toolbox.  A free download of a more extended discussion of facilitation is on Starhawk’s website at http://www.starhawk.org/.

See also the many resources at Lisa Fithian’s website: http://organizingforpower.wordpress.com/ And check out Tree Bresson’s website at: http://treegroup.info/topics/Top-10-Consensus-Mistakes.pdf. George Franklin’s website has copies of many direct action handbooks of the ‘Eighties at http://www.directaction.org/.

Posted in political activism, social justice | 13 Comments

My Day–The Short List

By Starhawk | Published: October 7, 2011

So here’s a short list of what I did today, just so you’ll understand why I’m not writing at great length tonight.  I got up early to make an 8:30 AM Pagan Cluster meeting down at McPherson Square.  I did a nonviolence training at 9:30 AM for two hours.  Then we ran off to the rally for the tar sands pipeline near Freedom Plaza.  We had an intense discussion about gender issues during the rally as we couldn’t hear the speakers well enough to understand anything they were actually saying, but the whole thing had great energy.  At the end, we started a drum circle and turned it into a spiral dance.  Then we got caught up in the anti-war march and went almost to the Martin Luther King memorial before Linda and I had to break off to walk at a fast pace back to McPherson to do a consensus training.  That ended as the march came through heading to the IMF/World Bank building, and I couldn’t resist joining that!  By the end, my energy was flagging so we caught a cab back.  Just as I arrived, the Occupy DC group asked me to facilitate their 6 pm General Assembly.  I did.  It was a challenging meeting, but we got through it.  By the end, I was tired.  The Pagan Cluster was meeting over by the big tree, We fell down on the grass and duck doo doo and lay in a puppy pile and had hysterics for a while.  Then we went over to Freedom Plaza, where Jason and Riyanna were facilitating the General Assembly.  That looked like the meeting from hell when I arrived, bogged down on trying to get consensus to break down into small groups.  I sat in on the meeting to give them some support.  When we finally got consensus, and finally ended the meeting, we drummed and sang “We’re going to make a revolution” to the tune of “What shall we do with the drunken sailor.”  My friend Lisa is in town for just a day—I caught one glimpse of her on the march and had a few moments at the end of the day to catch up, drinking a beer at the hotel where I’m sleeping tonight.

All of this to explain why I’m not blogging at great length tonight.  In a way, it’s quite amazing—all sorts of people from all over the country just discovering consensus process, eager to meet and plan and share ideas and experience the heady thrill of direct democracy in the streets.  Is it my greatest dream come true—or my worst nightmare, trying to facilitate meetings with people who are unfamiliar with the process and yet have very strong opinions on how you should be running the meeting.  And there’s the People’s Mike—a technique we’ve often used on the streets for short announcements, having groups of people repeat a speaker’s words.  But here they use it for entire meetings and complex arguments!  And of course, it makes everything take twice as long.  But people love it.  It makes you feel heard, and amplifies your voice.  It makes even prosaic statements sound like religious liturgy.  It creates a great sense of unity and community, which everybody craves.

Something is happening.  Occupations are springing up all over the place.  One of the young women organizers told me she’d passed on my consensus download to someone about to start Occupy Mississippi!  There are union folks here from Wisconsin, displaced stockbrokers from New York, laid off policy wonks from here in DC, affable former corporate managers from Texas, ex-cons from the ‘hood here in DC, a lot of homeless people, and students who’ve woken up to the fact that they are debt-slaves.  What will happen if ordinary folks all over the country get addicted to having a say in the decisions that affect their lives?

I feel more and more ent-like by the day.  You know, those ancient tree-beings out of Tolkien.  It’s not just the bendability factor, but the time thing.  I’m sixty, and these young generations of activists seem to come up so quickly, as if they are in a different time-stream.  The truth is, activist fashions don’t change that much and this cohort looks enough like the ones we were marching with ten years ago that they could be the very same people, somehow ageless, only with some very different sets of assumptions.  Instead of smashing the windows at Starbucks, they’re using the toilets and in return, rating them high on the internet.  Here in DC the police have been extremely mellow so far, and one young man actually proposes marching to thank them.  True, he doesn’t gather much support, but no one shouts him down.  And they all seem universally, unquestionably devoted to non-violence.

But I said I wasn’t going to write a long blog.  Tomorrow will bring more surprises—and yet more meetings!

Posted in Uncategorized, climate change, political activism, social justice | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Freedom Plaza–The First Day

By Starhawk | Published: October 6, 2011

“I hate young people!” I’m grumbling as I puff along in the wake of the march led by the Occupy DC folks who have established their base in McPherson Square.  They’ve asked for drummers and music on their march, but they are travelling at such a fast pace it’s all I can do to try and keep up with them, let alone drumming at the same time.  Simon helps by carrying my bag—he’s a young person but I forgive him for it.  Finally we reach our destination:  The Newseum where the American Ideas Forum is happening and where Dick Cheney is speaking.  We hold a short, spirited rally and head back to the Square at breakneck speed for the general assembly.

I don’t really hate them, however—just their tendency to compete for the Olympic Speed-Marching record.  Really I’ve had an amazing day, mostly spent in the company of predominantly young people who have set up this occupation, separate but linked to the events in Freedom Plaza.  The Occupy DC group are mostly locals, and they intend to stay in the square indefinitely.  They’re a mix of students and a good sprinkling of older people of varied backgrounds.  “I quit my job at Morgan Stanley,” says a well-dressed, gray-haired man.  An older woman with a rugged face talks about the protests of the sixties.  A slow-talking older man says that he wasn’t an activist in the sixties, he knew that stuff was happening but ignored it.  He’s not an activist now—he’s an analyst for a global corporation.  But if we don’t bring some reason into our tax system we will be destroying the base of labor upon which an economy rests.

The folks at Freedom Plaza, like us, mostly come from out of town.  Judging from the nonviolence training we did last night, more than half of them have never done anything like this before and many of them have come to the action alone, without knowing anyone else.  I admire their courage—I doubt that I would hop on a plane from Iowa or Texas to come demonstrate in Washington DC all by myself, with no support.  What if the other kids don’t like me, and I don’t make any friends?

I spent a lot of the day in meetings.  It was a bit like a relationship I once had where we spent far more time in couples counseling than we ever did having sex—I spent far more of the day in meetings than in the actions the meetings were meeting about.  But in a sense, maybe the meetings were actions—interposing this exercise in direct democracy at the feet of the lobbyists and the Congress and all the systems that are captives of money and corrupt power.  “Demoncracy” I wrote by accident—democracy made servant of the demons of greed.

Occupy DC has two General Assemblies a day.  Freedom Plaza has its own General Assembly.  With so many people new to consensus process, the meetings are sometimes ponderous—and yet there’s an archetypal quality to it all, people sitting under a tree debating and discussing and coming to decisions together in a process designed to assure that everyone has a voice.  I think we crave that experience, somewhere deep in the soul.  It is exactly what democracy looks like, and right now it seems that all over the world people are hearing the call.

I did sit in on their facilitators’ working group, and some of us from the Pagan Cluster gently offered some of our tips.  (All of which you can read in the free download on my website: “The Five-Fold Path of Productive Meetings”.http://www.starhawk.org/.  Three young men were down from the Occupy Wall Street group in New York and the DC folks were appreciative, thrilled, and admiring.  These young folks who learned their activist skills a month ago and now the seasoned veterans and the experts.

The evening assembly went much more smoothly, we were told, than yesterdays.  Simon—bless him—raised the issue of marching a bit more slowly, being aware of the tail of the march as well as the head.  His comments elicited a long discussion and a plethora of suggestions.  A tall,very dark man with a big smile from the Communications Workers of America explained how they always had marshalls in orange vests at all their marches.  Some people liked the idea of marshalls, others were wary of establishing a role that gave people power they might abuse.  I hear comments of staggering maturity and common sense:  “I’m as anti-authoritarian as anyone, but I’m against illegitimate authority and this would be giving people legitimate authority.”  “We’re asking people to take on responsibility and that’s a good thing, to use it in service of the groups—like these facilitators are doing, to make the process more democratic and easier for everyone to participate in.”  We don’t really come to a resolution, but do make a plan for the next day, a march to the IMF and World Bank.  Many people don’t know what the connection is to the economic interests at the heart of this action—others explain that the “austerity” measures we’re having forced on us have already been shoved down the throats of the global south by the IMF, and the poverty they’ve created abroad is now coming home to us as well.

The Freedom Plaza folks will be supporting the tar sands protests tomorrow.  Hearings are scheduled about the proposed pipeline that would carry the world’s dirtiest oil over the country’s key aquifer, running from Canada to Texas.  I want to do it all and I want to do some trainings and I want to lie in the sun and sleep.

At the very end of the night, we wait until the last performer on the Freedom Plaza stage is done, then we strike up the drums and lead people in a spiral dance.  “We are the rising sun, we are the change, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are dawning”—we used Raven’s beautiful chant and wove in and out under the stars, finishing with a cone of power.  Then a young woman standing next to me asked for one more song.  We sang song after song, from John Lennon’s “Imagine” to a rousing chorus of “What Can We Do with the Drunken Sailor” with the words changed.  It was very sweet, standing in a circle in the night, singing together.  Imagine!  This is what democracy looks like.  Imagine a world where we sing together, and together make the decisions that affect our lives.  It isn’t hard to do.  Then make that world together.  It’s easy if you try.  The old, corrupt world falls away and a new world is born.

Posted in Paganism/earth-based spirituality, political activism, social justice | 4 Comments