Remember when the Occupy Wall Street movement, considered all but dead, mobilized to aid New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia residents in the aftermath of Occupy Sandy?
With the decision of the NYPD's police union to stop doing the sort of "broken windows" policing that pleases their suburbanite fans and brings in $650 million in yearly revenue to the city (though the yearly costs of lawsuits against thumper cops eat up $400 million of that), Occupy now has another shot at embarrassing the authorities -- and this time in a way that will make a lasting difference in how those authorities behave.
I speak of a concept I call "Occupy Safety".
Follow me past the cartouche for more on this.
Over at the original OWS blog, I saw this piece of commentary from OWS veteran Micah White:
b>My thinking is moving away from protest. Instead, I’m more interested now with the power of social mobilization. The power of, basically, getting large numbers of people to change their behaviors, to depattern themselves, to actually get the facts collectively in order to tackle global challenges.
I think where it’s going now, it’s much more towards the Five Star in Italy, where they do things like getting people elected or, like, running very complicated organizations that are able to manage global problems. One of the things that’s happening is that we’re seeing these global problems that everyone faces, like Ebola, and that social movements might be the answer to those kind of problems, too. Right? Because they mobilize large numbers of people. They get large number of people to do highly synchronized actions together.
That's the principle behind
Occupy Sandy·
That can be the principle behind Occupy Safety.
Occupiers, are you listening? Once again, the same NYPD that crapped all over you in 2011 and laughed at you in 2012 is taking a big, steaming dump on the people you were organized to help.
Now is the time to step up. Show that true safety isn't about killing guys for selling loosies. Help reinforce the point tht fewer garbage arrests are the way to go.