So there I was, it was the last week of August, and I was nervous as hell. I was going (with my wife) to one of the first meetings that came to eventually be known as Occupy Orlando. I had never participated in a political protest like this before, and had no idea what to expect. Little did I know how intense life was going to become.. I'm trying to share my experiences here both to help organize my thoughts, and to show others exactly what happens during an occupation, and why things go very very wrong, very often.
Let me get this straight beforehand, I’m in my 30s, I have a job, I own a house, I run a company besides and I go to school full time as well, I'm not exactly lazy. I'm not a communist, a hippy, a socialist.. Hell I'm not any 'ist. I'm a military veteran and I indeed love the idea of my country. (Big confession, I don’t even consider myself "left" I'm more of a moderate)
So driving down to this meeting, I was having a crisis of conscience. I had been reading for weeks about the occupation on wall street, and found the concept admirable. However, I'm not naive, I was pretty aware from the get-go exactly how badly things could get, both from the perspective that folks in power tend to not just give it away without a fight, and that most likely things were going to get really ugly before there was going to be any sign of anything happening at all. In retrospect, while I thought I was being pragmatic, wow. I was a total optimist. I was to be fair, a bit freaked out on the way down there, I was expecting black SUV's and maybe helicopters to just swoop in and take me right off the road for even thinking about showing up to a meeting like this. I ultimately felt, that I had no right to critique, or armchair politician anymore unless I actually TRIED to make a difference.
Anyhow, we arrive, and there are say about 30-40 people there. I was quite enthused to see people (that I made the stupid assumption) that were just like me, and felt the same way I did (HA!) We talked; we discussed the General Assembly, how it worked, what the point was, and the various things that brought us there. They also asked for volunteers for working groups. At the point we were at this was prior to any actual occupation, we had not really done anything except for a small General Assembly outside the Orlando History Center. So we really did not have any playbook for how things were supposed to work outside of what information we could get from the internet, and some limited contacts we had with folks at Wall Street. I volunteered to be in the “peacekeepers” working group, as due to my military experience, it seemed the best fit for me at the time. This was shortly followed by me stepping up to be the facilitator of this working group, with a 21 year old history major as my co-facilitator.
The peacekeepers, were NOT a security force, rather they were a means to assure the safety of protestors, counter-protestors and bystanders. My co-facilitator wrote a lovely email to the volunteers that I believe described perfectly what we were about, I’ll excerpt it below:
“ If you are part of this group then it is safe to assume that you understand and appreciate the critical function our group offers. We cannot allow inappropriate, violent, or subversive action to compromise our message. That being said, our commitment to nonviolence and self-sacrifice cannot be over-emphasized. We are going to operate like a kind of protest security detail; so our actual involvement in outright protest is going to be minimized, if not ineffectual in comparison to the rest of the occupying community.
The purpose of this group is to be, to the best of our ability, the impartial check to irrationality and potential violence that similar environments produce. The protection of our occupying community and its message are of paramount concern. For this reason above all others, our passion must take a back seat for the sake of preserving the community.
The security of our occupying community, the safety of our brothers and sisters, and the purity of the message is our responsibility. In the most extreme circumstances we are committed to nonviolence and non-escalation, even at the price of personal injury. While as occupiers we are understandably angry and fed up, our movement and message is still rooted in love, reason and understanding.”
We were planning on our “BIG PUBLIC DEBUT” on the 15th of October, with a march followed by the occupation of Sen. Beth Johnson Park. (A smallish, tucked away park right next to the Orlando Chamber of Commerce building) At this point, we really had ABSOLUTELY no clue, what we were doing. We had no idea, that most political marches/protests etc. had MONTHS of planning beforehand, and here we were, winging it like amateurs.
Why were we doing this? 2 Main reasons, most people were (naturally) angry about the state of affairs in America, and that the experience of a properly run General Assembly is almost akin to a semi-religious experience. Where else in America can you get 2-300 people from different groups, backgrounds, races, sexual orientations and get them all to agree on a single proposal? When this actually happens, it is almost like a drug, the sheer euphoria that a 95% direct consensus summons. I cannot illustrate it effectively in mere words.
So, about a week into the “pre-occupation” (Heh, see what I did there?) Myself, and the other facilitators are already about as best of friends as one could imagine. (Keep in mind that we had not met each other in any way beforehand) I literally had to up the minutes on my cell to the max in order to keep up with the sheer volume of phone calls/texts/emails that the (giggle) pre-occupation required. We needed medical teams, food teams, transportation teams, materials teams, media teams, the list kept going and going and going. Hell we lost at least 2 facilitators for these teams before the occupation ever began. The occupation is like a “life vampire” It will suck you dry and bleed you out before you even have a clue what is going on.
Fast forward to October 15th, we all show up on a cold (for Florida) morning at the absolute ass-crack of dawn. We had no Idea what to expect, we had 1200 or so people on the Facebook page say they were coming, but again, if you blindly trust in the internet, that’s like blindly trusting government. It will screw you every time. But in this case, it happened.
Here is a snippet (overhead cam)
http://www.youtube.com/...
By the end of the march, we had acquired almost 1800-2000 people; we crowded out the plaza of City Hall.
http://www.youtube.com/...
I have to say in honesty, I have never been more proud of my fellow Floridians then that day.
I’ll write more later, as this story gets more and more complicated. People have mental breakdowns, things get hairy. But for now, it is DAY 31 of the Occupation in Orlando. (And we are still there.)