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Last Wedenesday students from dozens of campuses across the country participated in walkouts in support of Occupy Wall Street. After a hurried set of discussions over the weekend, organizers of those events called a second day of action for today.
Some 144 colleges in thirty states have announced plans for actions on the Occupy Colleges website, with more than fifty of them providing links to their protests’ Facebook pages. This may not be, as one widely-circulated prediction called it, “biggest student protest on US soil since 1970,” but it’s looking pretty big.
The official call to action slated 4:30 ET as the kickoff for today’s events, but a number of campuses are planning to start earlier. Check back here for updates as the day rolls on.
The Student Labor Action Project, a joint effort of the United States Student Association and Jobs With Justice, has posted a set of OWS reports from student activists at U Mass Amherst, George Washington University, the University of Oregon, the University of Central Florida, and Brandeis.
From the introduction by SLAP coordinator Chris Hicks:
“What the mainstream media has failed to understand is that what the youth, the workers, and the unemployed want is justice. This is a justice that has been denied to many of us in our lifetimes – an idea that we once heard of but have never known. The issues that so many of us fight for can all be traced back to the same small group of people: it’s the corporate lobbyists that have prevented any meaningful change to immigration laws; it has been the corporations that have scaled back workers rights; it has been the corporations that have drowned college graduates in debt. For the first time in my life, we have been able to step back from our single issues and collectively look at who is responsible for the injustice we face daily and say, ‘It’s time to make Wall Street pay.’
“We are not demanding reform. We are not demanding that the current system left to us be improved. We are demanding transformative and fundamental change. We are acknowledging that the current system has not worked for us, and that we need something new if we are to going to create a sustainable future.
“When we look back a year from now and ask, ‘What happened at Wall Street?’ it’ll be very clear. We stood against those that oppress and said ‘Enough.’”
Nice piece Monday in the Daytona News-Journal (of all places) about a successful student protest campaign at the University of Denver to save the campus library from being emptied of books. The whole thing is worth reading, but this introductory graf is a fascinating little tidbit:
“Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the 1965 incident, passion was roused after the administration ended the morning coffee break, a 50-minute period during which no classes were conducted. Students blocked traffic, lit fires and battled with police, but failed to win back their caffeine privileges. It was an era when everything was a Big Deal, and the mood on many campuses was volatile.”
That “Coffee Break Riot” is exactly the kind of thing that gets pooh-poohed as unsubstantial in student protest, but if you squint just a little you can see it’s about student culture, campus environment, and the question of who is going to set the rules under which students will live. None of those are trivial matters, and all of them are worth thinking seriously about.
Also worth noting in that vignette is the year: 1965. That’s well before the widespread protests of the sixties got underway. As I said in a historical address once, the student past is far weirder, far more interesting, than we imagine.
I’m mulling a (nother) longer post on the question of demands and clarity of mission as it applies to activist movements, but in the meantime, check this out:
“We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.
“Nonviolence, as it grows from the Judeo-Christian tradition, seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society.
“Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear. Love transcends hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Faith reconciles doubt. Peace dominates war. Mutual regards cancel enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.
“By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.
“Although each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this statement of purpose, each act or phase of our corporate effort must reflect a genuine spirit of love and good-will.”
Weak, no?
Other than a commitment to “nonviolence,” which is itself more than a little fuzzy as a strategy, it’s completely vacuous. “A social order of justice permeated by love.” What the hell does that mean? That “the redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.” Well, okay, but how? “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence.” Seriously?
And then, of course, the last paragraph is a total punt. “Each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this purpose.” Come on.
Movements need demands. Movements need clear and specific goals. Otherwise they’ll never amount to anything.
The ongoing saga of Twitter’s seeming censorship of activist trending topics got new datapoint in the wake of the arrest of a hundred Occupy Boston demonstrators late last night — the phrase “Occupy Boston” trended globally for a while this morning, while #OccupyBoston, with three times the total traffic, did not.
What’s curious about this is the fact that unlike the failed TTs I’ve discussed in the past, the trendlines for Occupy Boston and #OccupyBoston were quite similar before last night’s surge. In fact, the two terms rose almost exactly in sync yesterday until #OccupyBoston shot up as the arrests began after midnight. Now, #OccupyBoston had seen more traffic in previous days, but those raw numbers were tiny, and I don’t think they explain the failure of the tag to trend. Rather, I think the after-midnight spike holds the answer.
Why did #OccupyBoston spike so heavily as the arrests took place? Because of intensive, concerted efforts by OWS supporters to get the word out. And as I’ve noted before, Twitter (and it’s algorithm genies) hate intensive, concerted efforts — they don’t want anyone gaming their system but them.
But while #OccupyBoston was getting tweeted and retweeted by that (admittedly large and growing) core group, Occupy Boston was being tweeted and retweeted by a much broader and more diverse crowd — the kind of people who aren’t up on the latest hashtags. Those folks — journalists, local Bostonians, curious onlookers from all over the world — gave Occupy Boston a breadth of traffic that #OccupyBoston lacked, and the oomph to put it onto the trending topics list on a global basis.
I should make it clear that all this is an educated guess on my part, rather than established fact. Twitter doesn’t release much info about their algorithms. But I shook some Twitter folks out of the woodwork last year when this came up around #Wikileaks, and everything I’ve said here jibes with what I learned from them (and my own investigations) back then.
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