A lot of people have seemed impatient that the movement now occupying Liberty Plaza near Wall Street has not stated an explicit demand. What a visit to the plaza reveals, though, is that what really matters is not a what at all, but a how.
If you are in New York City on Thursday, come check out the launch of Revolutionaries Live—a speaker series hosted by the Yes Lab at New York University. Ivan Marovic (pictured above as a battering ram) will be kicking things off with a talk on the role of humor and creative activism, drawing on his experience forming the Serbian student movement Otpor (that played a critical role in the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000) and his more recent work as a consultant and nonviolence trainer for pro-democracy groups around the world. I will be there to introduce Ivan and am really looking forward to the event, especially since afterward we will take the subway down to Liberty Plaza and join with those occupying Wall Street.
The talk will be hosted at 721 Broadway, 6th floor and begins at 7pm. Please RSVP if you plan on coming. Or just drop by Liberty Plaza around 9pm.
The annual United Nations International Day of Peace and Ceasefire will be marked today with thousands of events around the world. From a moment of silence at noon in every time zone, to “Stand-Up for Peace” comedy events at 55 different venues, to decorative “Pinwheels for Peace” created and displayed by millions of young people around the globe, the day offers an opportunity for peacebuilders to engage and educate others on the various meanings of, and paths to, a more just and peaceful world.
As Valerie Elverton Dixon notes in a post on God’s Politics:
In both the Hebrew and the Greek concepts of peace, the idea goes far beyond the absence of war or violent conflict. Shalom includes the ideas of health, friendship, safety, prosperity and rest. The holiness of Shalom is wholeness. Similarly, the Greek word eirene includes the ideas of quietness, rest, prosperity, happiness, harmony, and to set at one again. Eirene is also the Greek goddess of peace whose sisters are Eunomia (order) and Dikē (justice.)
As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” his 1962 book about nuclear weapons, which was published widely for the first time in 2004:
The whole world faces a momentous choice. Either our frenzy of desperation will lead to destruction, or our loyalty to truth, to God and to our fellow man will enable us to perform the patient, heroic task of building a world that will eventually thrive in unity, order and peace.
Forty-nine years later, we still face that choice. The International Day of Peace is a useful and increasingly popular opportunity for the general public to reflect, individually and collectively, on how to make sure we choose wisely.
In Chile the movement for education is nothing new, as Luisa Trujillo eloquently explains on this site. I first heard about it in 2006, when a friend knocked on my door, shouting that I should come out to join the march heading to a plaza downtown. I rushed out.
Throughout my life, and that of my parents, we have watched students year after year assemble in city plazas to march for reforms concerning bus passes, school infrastructure, or for more scholarships. Sometimes it’s the high school students, as in the “Movement of the Penguins” (in allusion to high school uniforms) in 2006; other times, it’s been only university students; most times, we’ve cooperated with each other, understanding that whether we’re in our teens or our 20s, we strive for a common goal. This is not a movement; it has been the movement in Chile for nearly four decades.
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The sun rose this morning—behind clouds—on a tent city in occupied Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District, where protesters entered their fourth day of encampment. A farmer’s market was setting up alongside the usual food trucks. Although police had already intervened in taking down a tent on the occupation’s first night, the prospect of early morning rain today made many decide around midnight to set up tarps over media and food supplies, as well as to erect several of the tents that had been donated by the rapper Lupe Fiasco to sleep in themselves. This made for some of the protesters’ most trying confrontations yet with those sworn to serve and protect them.
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I’ve always liked the War Resisters League’s broken rifle logo. But it raises a question: What do you do with all that metal after the gun is snapped in half?
While the Bible talks about beating swords into plowshares, over at God’s Politics, Sojourners web editor Cathleen Falsani writes of another, more artistic possibility. Some of the more the 2,700 guns that were traded for grocery gift certificates at a gun buy-back event run by the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles (VPC) earlier this year are now:
being “up-cycled” — melted down and re-purposed — as works of art.
One such guns-to-art creation is the “Angel of Peace” sculpture by artist Lin Evola, founder of the Peace Angels Project in California. Founded by Evola in 1992, Peace Angels “uses art as a tool for peace, working with schools and organizations at both a local and global level.”
Evola has created peace angels for Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
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As hundreds occupy a private park near Wall Street for the fourth consecutive day, organizers for Tar Sands Action have announced the next phase of their campaign and not surprisingly it’s another marathon protest, coinciding with the planned October 6 occupation of Washington DC. Momentum for sustained protest pressure in the US is clearly mounting, along with our many problems.
Here’s what Duncan Meisel of Tar Sands Action had to say in an email earlier this morning:
We’re asking all of you who are able to get there to join us again in Washington, D.C. on Friday, October 7th for a noon time rally at the Ronald Reagan Building outside the final State Dept. hearing on the Keystone XL pipeline. We’ll be meeting at the 14th St. entrance between Pennsylvania Ave. and Constitution Ave.
We are teaming up with our good friend and Billionaries for Bush founder Andrew Boyd—and activists from other grassroots groups, including Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, The Center for Artistic Activism, SmartMeme, Beyond the Choir and The Ruckus Society—to create an exciting new resource called Beautiful Trouble. As the Kickstarter campaign describes the project:
Beautiful Trouble will be a book & web toolbox that puts the best ideas and tactics of creative action in the hands of the next generation of change-makers, connecting the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest to the popular outrage of the current political moment.
From prank websites to militant carnivals, flash mobs to virtual sit-ins, social activism has a creative new edge that is melding prank and PR, direct action protest and pop art. More and more, activists and artists find themselves together on the barricades.
But in the heat of battle, the principles that make creative actions successful seldom get hashed out or written down — until now. Beautiful Trouble will arm our movements with their own best weapons.
Beautiful Trouble will pull together an interlocking set of design principles, best practices, innovative tactics and case studies, that will enable anyone to pull off effective creative actions.
Having seen the book develop from the inside, I can confidently say that it will be an invaluable handbook for activists—and one that I will be regularly turning to—for many years to come.
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I was among those who were shocked, not to say disgusted, when biologist Garret Hardin argued, in 1974, that the relatively well-off nations were like passengers in a lifeboat surrounded by more stranded people than they could take on board. So, his logic ran, we needed to triage the world and write off some people and lands as too far gone to rescue from immanent starvation. I went on record, along with others, saying that we wanted to be included in that abandoned third; we did not wish to live in a world that turned its back on fellow human beings with such callous disregard.
Words are cheap, perhaps, but our revulsion at “lifeboat ethics” was real. And it’s back. A provocative essay by Bronwyn Bruton, a democracy and governance expert writing for the Council on Foreign Relations has urged the West to withdraw from Somalia [see Ms. Bruton's response to this], and her scheme (which she calls “constructive disengagement”) is finding a resonance with policy elites around the world who now seem poised to wash their hands of Somalia and watch three quarters of a million people starve.
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In the newly-renamed Liberty Plaza, the place that hundreds of protesters have come to call home for the last three days, nothing is quite predictable. At around 6:15 in the morning, those of us sleeping on the plaza’s hard, cold surface got the call to wake up, and someone called for a General Assembly meeting at 7. After people groggily packed up their bedding and lined up for dumpster-dived bagels, the meeting began. Its purpose was a run-down of the day’s events. Committees that were meeting the night before had decided to have marches to Wall Street at 9, 11:30, and 3:30. But then somebody came to the front and announced through the “people’s microphone”—those around him echoed one phrase at a time so others could hear—that he was heading off to march now. Wall Street bankers were walking to work as we were sitting there! He ran off and, immediately, one or two hundred others followed. They marched around the plaza, chanting “Occupy Wall Street! / All Day! All Week!” and then set off heading south on Broadway. The first weekday demonstration of the occupation had begun.
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