Yesterday I drove up to Albany and back to do some archival preservation work, and in a little while I’m flying to Wisconsin to keynote a convention of United Council, the University of Wisconsin’s systemwide student association.
Hoping to have time to blog from the road. If not, you can keep up with my thoughts about the conference on Twitter until I return.
Oh, and if you’d like to have me come speak at your campus or event, just let me know.
The Daily Show has been on vacation since Occupy Wall Street broke big in the media, so last night’s show was their chance to play catch-up. And they made some … well … odd choices.
Stewart led off the four-minute segment by calling OWS “the Hard Rock Cafe of leftist movements” before doing a gag about OWS’s fundraising prowess and another snarking on Mitt Romney’s opportunism. But the segment’s last — and longest — bit was this one:
“Of course it hasn’t been all good news for the movement. For all their popularity, for all the participants with thoughtful critiques of our power structure, there’s also this: A guy taking a shit [bleeped] on a police car.
“You know what? Guy shitting [bleeped] on a police car? Meet me at camera three.
“NO! NO! BAD! [mimes spraying with water bottle, whacking with rolled up newspaper] NO! NAUGHTY! NAUGHTY!
” ‘Cause here’s the problem. Unfortunately, protests are often as much about optics as they are about substance. And you do not want this [photoshopped photo of Chinese democracy protester shitting on row of tanks] to be your Tiananmen Square. You have tapped into a real injustice that people feel about the global financial markets. Nothing can derail your movement faster than someone who is unable to derail their movements.”
Now, I get it. It’s hard to resist a poop joke. I get that.
But here’s the thing.
In a grassroots movement like this, individual people are going to do stupid things on occasion. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way to stop it. And as long as everyone recognizes that fact, and is attentive to the distinction between bad acts that reflect movement culture and bad acts that don’t, the those occasional moments of jackassery aren’t a huge deal.
Which is to say that no, Jon Stewart, some idiot taking a dump on a cop car (ten days ago!) isn’t going to “derail the movement.”
No. What derails movements isn’t random acts of jackassery. What derails movements is the disproportionate attention such acts sometimes draw, and the endless hand-wringing that sometimes ensues.
Luckily, that hasn’t happened here. A Google search on the cop car story returns nearly half a million hits, but that’s less than a tenth of a percent of the half a billion hits that “occupy wall street” gets on its own. The incident got a bit of attention when it happened, then mostly sank under the waves as actual news kept happening and folks moved on.
But not everyone is able to resist a poop joke, and not everyone is able to resist an opportunity to lecture activists about “optics.”
And so last night Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers pulled down their pants and squatted.
Naughty, naughty.
In an op-ed in today’s Guardian, a British advocate for young criminal offenders reports that after August’s UK riots protocols for youth justice were tossed out the window:
“About a quarter of participants in London were under the age of 17, yet all protocol regarding youth justice was ignored. Youth services have worked hard over recent years to establish a rulebook for young offenders, designed to keep them away from the dangerous chasm of the adult justice system. Youth courts, specially trained magistrates, targeted assistance by youth offending teams, triage and assessment, social worker involvement – all have been slanted towards rehabilitation and welfare. This good work was overturned when young people were “herded” – another brave word from Greany – from police cells into the adult courts. Long sentences were imposed. Young people who might have been helped to live differently are now in jails, dispersed all over the country to rub shoulders with career criminals and murderers.”
On Tuesday I wrote that Occupy Wall Street had grown “too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.” The very next day Bloomberg announced plans to do just that.
Oops.
But then at 6:40 this morning, just twenty minutes before the scheduled eviction, he blinked. (It was later reported that the decision had been made at midnight, but this seems hard to fathom — if so, why let excitement and numbers build for another six hours? Why give OWS the heady catharsis of a last-minute victory?)
Bloomberg suggested in an interview today that interventions by pro-OWS local legislators changed the mind of the company that owns Zuccotti Park, but whether this tells the whole story or not, it’s clear that something happened between Wednesday and early this morning to shift the players’ sense of the politics of the situation dramatically. To announce an eviction and then rescind that announcement handed OWS a huge morale boost, and made any future attempt to remove OWS from Zuccotti Park far more difficult.
This is getting interesting.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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