[Made a few changes. I've republished with a better edited version]
Something happened to me at my local OccupyPortland a few weeks ago. And although this diary about the incident was in draft form, set aside for more editing, the subject matter seems relevant to a debate occurring on DKos, so maybe I should post it now.
Recently in Oregon, at one of our Occupy Portland General Assembly meetings, I witnessed (and participated in) an incident involving a violent, inebriated man who was loudly disturbing one of our first assemblies.
I’ve been thinking about the experience ever since. I’ll try to explain how this experience has influenced my view of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Maybe you’ll agree with my conclusions, maybe you won’t.
More below…
In attendance at the GA were an estimated 200 to 250 persons, and this meeting was formative, since it was in the very early stages of the Portland organization. Everyone was just becoming accustomed to the democratic consensus process and the horizontal sharing of power (rather than hierarchical), and had not yet encountered such an aggressive and loud disruption at a meeting. People were inexperienced in how to handle these kinds of situations without getting on their cell phones and calling in the authorities.
The offending person, a large man of about 30 years, was obviously heavily intoxicated, with the strong smell of hard liquor on his breath, and his aggressive, animated movements, loud speech and threatening body language indicated he was on the verge of becoming violent. When the meeting had just begun, he commenced with yelling so loudly most of the audience could not hear the discussion, despite the use of electronic amplification by those speaking in front of the group, and the use of the human microphone by everyone else.
His behavior had made it impossible for the meeting to effectively continue, despite the attempt to ignore him by almost all in attendance.
In OccupyPortland, as in other OWS assemblies, there are volunteers who are assigned to be “peacekeepers.” An older man with a long ponytail, wearing the Peacekeeper armband, was on the scene trying to get the drunken man to leave the group. He began to pull the man’s arm, leading him through the amassed crowd toward the periphery, away from the crowd. The man was becoming increasingly resistant to the pulling, and began yelling even louder. A bit of a scuffle ensued. The peacekeeper, who was older, rugged and weathered in appearance, but far smaller in stature, helplessly backed off, bewildered as to how to respond.
“You’re acting just like the Republicans!” the intoxicated man roared at the whole crowd. “You’re all just like them! You want to control everything! You want to keep people from talking! You’re not any different!” The crowd was visibly taken aback by the accusations. No one wanted to be like them, the corrupt, corporate-protecting, law and order fanatics who would love to use their clout to throw us all in jail for protesting in the streets.
Yanking his arm free from the grasp of the Peacekeeper, he defiantly held his ground, his shouts and exhortations becoming angrier by the minute. I was nearby, within a few feet of him. I wanted to be supportive of the Peacekeeper, since I’d observed the poor guy was handling the whole thing all by himself, with the crowd all the while trying to ignore the yelling man, avoiding eye contact and staring at the facilitator in front, who tried to keep talking into the microphone, keeping up a futile pretense of normality. If it became absolutely necessary I would have been willing to physically assist the Peacekeeper. A few others seemed ready, as well. But we all were extremely reluctant to go down that road. Imagine the scene that would have been visible for the cameras.
The Peacekeeper and I moved away from the crowd and huddled together in discussion, while the disruptive man, still in the middle of the group, stood with his head tilted back, screaming at the night sky, as if addressing some old injustice inflicted upon him by the heavens. A younger man wearing a black hoody, about 22 years old and looking like a street-wise Portlander, joined us.
“We’ve got to get him out of here!” said the Peacekeeper, clearly exasperated. “We’ve got to call the police! He’s getting violent!”
“We can’t call the cops,” said the younger man, “because once we ask them for help, we’re showing we can’t resolve our own problems in the park, and we run the risk that they will use that as an excuse to arrest us all, or they might force us all out of the park.”
The older man stared blankly at the younger man, momentarily struck speechless by this new insight, and we all found ourselves standing there without any answers to the situation. While I agreed that calling the cops probably wasn’t a good idea, the Peacekeeper (following protocols of training?) still wanted to bring them in, but we instead went back to the drunken man and tried once again to reason with him. The crowd was still trying to ignore him, as if he were a mirage, despite his yelling and flailing gesticulations. We tried to gently talk with him, using a non-aggressive, collaborative approach. The Peacekeeper adopted a role of passive observance from a distance.
One or two others in the crowd joined us in the effort, and the non-confrontational approach reflected a spontaneous, intuitive decision in the group to use conflict resolution methods to deescalate, rather than arguing or resorting to verbal threats or even physical force. By all appearances, none of us were experts in this method, but we winged it. One person softly touched him on his arm in a show of compassion, but another quietly pointed out it is better he not be touched. Another asked him what his name was, to establish conversational human rapport and non-threatening communication.
The man responded by yelling, “Quit asking me my name, you just want to turn me over to the police!”
“No..,” someone quietly murmured, “we won’t turn you over to the police.”
Another person said, “We just want to have this meeting, and we can’t hear anyone talking. We’re okay with you being here, just don’t yell, okay?”
This went on for awhile, while most in the crowd completely ignored the commotion, which was the best course of action, and in fact, the perfect response. But ignoring that was like ignoring the sound of a freight train. By our collectively having used a non-aggressive, indirect and non-confrontational approach, he began to relax. He kept yelling sporadically, but his voice became a bit less loud. Over a period of about 10 or 15 minutes, he had more or less settled into sitting with the rest of us. He seemed completely unaware that sitting all around him on the hard asphalt were people keenly keeping an eye on his behavior, ready and willing to step in and protect people nearby, but also willing to allow him to be part of the group, even while drunk, if he seemed able to behave peacefully.
Some thoughts about this:
So what’s the big deal, you ask? I suppose it may be one of those occasions when you had to have been there to understand. It was extraordinary to see this whole group act like… sane people. In any other group, this certainly would have tended toward a violent interaction, with some people in the audience possibly being drawn in, yelling counter insults, denouncing his various pronouncements as lies, telling him to shut up, to pipe down, to go away, eventually using, if without help from police, the brute force of several people to drag him away, and probably, once outside the group where the police were standing in observation, to be further restrained, arrested, taken to jail with charges filed, resulting in a criminal record and possible imprisonment, all costing money, pain, and injury to a man (suffering from alcoholism or mental illness?) who was having a really bad day, not to mention the lingering reverberations of discord that would have rippled through the crowd. The police and media would have used the event to smear the movement in its early stages. Instead, all of that was avoided. The man likely went away feeling as if the community had accepted him, and everyone involved was able to experience what happens when a group finds more enlightened methods to resolve social conflicts without direct confrontation and counter-aggression to end a squabble.
The bottom line is people treated him with dignity, as if he had value, in a manner that respected his humanity. He wasn’t made into an enemy, or disparaged or labeled, or thrown out on his ear as an outcast.
It was a moment to savor.
He was not treated as if he were a lawless criminal who gave up the right to basic respect. No one turned the ordeal into a vindictive mob rush to judgment. No one used his behavior as an excuse to throw out the “bad guy” who was insulting the crowd. They refused to resort too quickly to the often failed black and white approach of standing on the rights of the majority to harshly and excessively punish the guilty, rather than focus on what is truly cathartic for everyone involved . They were willing to accept his presence unless it became unbearable.
The approach worked. And there is the word for this: Tolerance.
The American criminal justice system solves problems with punishment rather than conflict resolution. Illness and maladjustment are criminalized. The worse the crime, the harsher the punishment. It's as if little if any attempt is made to address the underlying disenfranchisement that can cause people to become disruptive. People often have social needs, involving economic inequality, physical and emotional illness, and other issues. If these needs aren't met, they often act out. Fulfill the needs, and sometimes the problem is solved. Everyone benefits. One can see this American tendency to solve problems punitively in other venues, such as in the workplace, schools, even here on Dkos, with the hide rate system. Rather than seek consensus and resolve conflicts non-aggressively, people punish with the ultimate weapon: The person's speech is punitively eliminated or even banned.
For several days afterwards I contemplated the significance of this incident. The collective consensus process, the group sharing of power equally, the less authoritarian methods of interaction and settling of disputes, and the group instinct to err on the side of using an approach of peaceful conflict resolution, instead of the usual punitive, guilt-laden approach of law-enforcement and police power, was deeply influential and impactful to forming my sense of the OWS movement (at least in the way it is taking shape in Portland).
These are the kind of people I want to have by my side when the shit hits the fan.
And if I ever get drunk in a park (not likely, although I was arrested when I was a teenager for dancing around a bonfire in a park, while stoned on acid!), I want these people to be my peers. If only we all, in every forum or workplace or gathering, could turn to governing ourselves as much as possible in this tolerant fashion. Wouldn’t it be better if our larger society were like this social microcosm in the parks of Portland? Compared to the conventional social environment to which most of us are accustomed, this group is much more forgiving, cooperative, non-violent, and willing to allow greater latitude of personal freedom to its denizens without the quick, reflexive use of authority and force.
This is the kind of world I want to live in.
In a humorous aside, my partner, who stood back on the periphery of the audience, overheard two policemen a few feet way, outside of the crowd, who were discussing the fracas. One said to the other, “I’m not going in there to get that guy. I don’t want to end up on YouTube!” The police in Portland are evidently afraid of using force in front of the cameras! That’s one of the benefits of having the whole world watching, and part of what allows the OWS movement to work. Everyone is now a witness.
And I should also note that the police and the OccupyPortland group now have an agreement of sorts, as I understand, to allow police to come into the camp to deal with any violence or serious problems, without bothering or disrupting the peaceful inhabitants in the process.
The Portland Police, thus far, have been tolerant. I hope this lasts. One policeman, speaking in low tones out of earshot of other cops, said, “You know, on that, I agree with you,” to a few of us who were, in a recent march, holding a banner which read “How’s that war economy working out for you?”
Long live the Occupation!