I haven't been out to Occupy Boston much this week, as I'm nursing a cold that doesn't want to die off. But, Friday night, there was an indoor event: the premier meeting of Ocupemos el Barrio. The Latino community is taking a peek at this Occupy movement. I went to listen and to meet some of the 99% we aren't seeing at Occupy Boston, yet.
When I arrived at the announced location, I was told that they had to move the meeting because more people had RSVP'd than they'd expected and the room was too small. An auspicious beginning!
So, I walked with another woman - Mercedes - over to a nearby church, where a local pastor had offered a large room downstairs and he was making coffee. I helped wash out an old urn so that we could also have hot water for tea.
The meeting had to start late because it was to held in Spanish and they were providing an English translator with headsets for those who needed it. The headsets were late, so they held off starting.
Immediately, I was aware of how much more inclusive this community is by default. They always have to consider language. Those who have grown up here may speak English but, those who have immigrated more recently, likely, don't. If Brazilians are present, they may only speak Portuguese. There could be French Guineans or indigenous peoples from anywhere in Central or South America. Establishing multi-lingual channels of communication is a given when they have a gathering.
At Occupy Boston, we have put a call out now and again for someone who can sign the meeting for the hearing impaired, but we've never had any other translators. I wondered how much broader participation we'd get if we arranged for translation. How difficult would it be? We live in fairly cosmopolitan city with embassies and cultural centers from Clearly, it wasn't that difficult for Ocupemos el Barrio. If we wanted to be welcoming to the Latino community, we could simply ask them how to provide for translation.
While waiting, I noticed one my new friends from the Facilitation Working Group. He is from Puerto Rico. He told me he was taking stack. He seemed a bit anxious. He mentioned that some of the organizers were not warm to the idea of using consensus for decision-making. I got the sense that it wasn't simply that which had him on edge. I told him I think it's okay if they don't adopt consensus, at first. They are self-organizing and need to come together on their own terms and make their own ways. If they start interacting with the larger Occupy movement, they'll get a chance to experience consensus in those encounters and will have future opportunities to discern if they'd like to adopt the values of the global movement of horizontal democracy. For now, it is enough that they are moved to act. We need more and more people to come out and talk to each other. That has to be the primary concern. So, I don't want to see us turning people away because we are parochial about process right up front.
Still, he was anxious. I hadn't seen him like this at Occupy Boston, so my curiosity was piqued.
Finally, the headsets arrived and we could begin. Three men sat at a table in the front of the room. The one in the center was an older man. Perhaps in his 60s. He opened the meeting and then had the two younger men speak about the issues which are particular to the immigrant community. I didn't hear anything new. Still, it is more pressing when you are in a room full of the very people who live with them.
It is painfully immediate to hear about businesses being raided and people taken away without notifying their family members. Sometimes, the employees have children in school and there are no accommodations made to contact anyone for that child's sake. Imagine, you're waiting after school and no one comes. Your mom never comes. She is just gone. The government took her. Her only crime: she was born in another country and doesn't have "papers" here. (I imagine a world where we don't have these artificial national boundaries any longer. To my mind, it is a human right to live wherever on the planet you choose. It is inhumane what we do in the name of "protecting national boundaries".)
Stories were told and analysis and opinions offered for about an hour and a half. the room was only available until 8. At 7:45 we were still on agenda item #1. There was frustration in the room, as one of the men at the table took 10 minutes of microphone time to "offer global context". It wasn't that his information was irrelevant. It was that most of the people here know it. It's a global audience. And they were edgy that we hadn't gotten anywhere near discussion steps to take to become of a part of the Occupy movement.
In the end, the meeting moved back to the original location and went on for another 2 hours.
There were tensions within the community. At one point, I quietly noted to David that the women weren't speaking. In fact, there had been a lot of back and forth from the older men. It definitely had that traditional feeling of being lectured to by your elders. That came to a head when a young woman challenged one of the men. He then became upset that he had been personally attacked. He seemed to move on after a while, but I can see that this will be an issue for this community to tackle.
The Occupy movement is a real youth movement. Not because the youth are more energetic and angrier. Not because they don't have the same life commitments as those of us who are older. It's a youth movement because this generation has grown up with a completely different paradigm of communication. With texting and the internet, they are used to an egalitarian system. They are used to crowd-sourcing ideas and accepting input from all corners. There is a lot less rankism. And because they have been using direct mass communications for so long, they are not as subject to the influences of big media. Additionally, they are far more used to taking in information from myriad sources and on multiple subjects and they have been developing brains which synthesize all of that and connect the dots a lot better than those of us who grew up reading one book at a time or having one conversation at time.
This is also a youth movement because they have grown into adulthood to discover that the older generations have left them a failed world. Economies around the world are crashing with no viable plans to pick up the pieces and rebuild. The planet itself is ecologically failing under the selfish and short-sighted practices of the human race.
So, when someone tries to be persuasive by saying, "I've been organizing for 30 years....", it falls on deaf ears. What the speaker sees as a solid reference of experience, the listeners hear as a confession of failure. This is not unique to the Latino immigrant community. We're seeing it everywhere with the Occupy movement. How many times will we hear, "this expert says..." or "research has shown...." with the speaker expecting those in the movement to be swayed to their influence? Hey, if they are such experts and the research is so useful, how is it that we're in this mess?
It's time for the voices of experience to be quiet for a while. Listen to the voices of those who have new perspectives. The world needs some profound healing. No one has generated that healing, yet, so let's see what this new generation has to offer.
It will be interesting to see how this manifests in Ocupemos el Barrio. There was, indeed, a debate how whether to use consensus for their decision-making. It's probably no surprise that the older the person in the room, the less likely the support for consensus. I was struck by the fact that they feared being controlled by a minority. "Some minority voice could just block everything." Here is a community whose needs have been ignored for eons because they are not the political majority voice in this country. They have lived under the tyranny of the majority, yet they fear the tyranny of the minority. There was no final decision about what decision-making process they would use.
There had been a proposal to adopt a set of demands, but the people present didn't feel ready for that. They felt that the first order of business was outreach to get more people talking to one another. They didn't feel that 30 people at a first gathering could meaningfully define the movement for all of the Latino community. The proposal was tabled.
Ocupemos el Barrio's first meeting ended with the formation of a few working groups and a plan to meet again. Even the creation of working groups had it's tensions. There was a mention of creating a Direct Action working group. As they were closing the discussion and recapping which working groups had been established, I didn't hear them mention Direct Action. I brought it up and I guess I missed it being nixed for now. It was nixed because there were people there from existing organizations who were quite apoplectic about anyone else planning any actions. One quite literally said, "we'll plan the actions and let people know when they can help." I imagine there will be some heated moments to come if Ocupemos el Barrio grows and meshes more with the greater Occupy movement. If that happens, the reality of horizontal democracy will be that no one gets to control who can form a working group and who can plan actions. For the moment, this group agreed to acquiesce to the "leaders" in the room. We'll see how long that lasts.
People expressed a bit of frustration with not having made any big decisions. There is an excitement about the Occupy movement, but also an anxiety. A lot of concern that we need to "seize the moment" or "lose this opportunity". My sense is that this also reflects some old school thinking. What the Occupy movement is doing is developing new channels of information sharing and communications. It's taking the public dialogue away from the corporate media and dragging everyone into more immediate and intimate conversations. It's requiring that people not sit around waiting to be told what to think, but to get out, get information and generate your own ideas. This is the fundamental change in the way we operate which will lead to us making different decisions about how to fix the ills of the world.
Those who worry are still thinking in opportunistic mode. That's because we've ben trained to think in terms of competition and scarcity. That breeds the feelings that you have to win now because if you don't you've lost your only chance. But, opportunism is what ravaged the natural resources of the planet and has beat the human spirit into enslaved submission. We need a new mode of operations. This is not a moment of opportunity. It is the beginning of sustainability. We are laying the foundation for something more sustainable in the long run. We need to be willing to take the time to wake each other up and learn how to go about things differently.
We aren't going to see "results" over night with this movement. There will be baby steps for a while. I expect to see a transformation which takes decades. New generations of people will be born into this new mode of working together and they will not have the vestiges of competitive opportunism in their psyches.
Ocupemos el Barrio is born out of a community with a unique set of immediate issues. What compels them to investigate this Occupy movement may be different from other affinity groups. Still, what needs to happen internally and the dynamics I witnessed are really no different from what I've seen elsewhere. It's so exciting to see everyone coming out of the woodwork and considering what we might do differently. I truly hope we all have the compassion and faith in one another to hang in there for the long haul. It will be a thrilling ride.
Everywhere around the globe we need to occupy our hearts and minds with a vision of a just and sustainable world for all living beings. That requires global solidarity. So, welcome Ocupemos el Barrio!