With the authorities in the Siberian city of Barnaul refusing to permit opposition protests since December 10, activists have deployed a creative tactic to voice their opposition to the recent disputed parliamentary elections.

According to the Guardian, rather than take to the streets themselves, and risk arrest or worse, they set up a public display of:

dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

This unorthodox action threw the police for a loop, who asked prosecutors to investigate its legality. As protest organizer Lyudmila Alexandrova said:

They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities.

It is this kind of overreaction that organizers should hope for. By revealing so clearly the absurdity of the state’s attempt to crackdown on dissent, while getting a laugh in process, actions like these will likely only galvanize the opposition.

To see more photos of the display, click here.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

Activists both in Syria and abroad collaborate via Skype, Facebook, and Twitter to make their voices heard without resorting to violence. The results are inspiring: a laser shines a green beam across Damascus and onto the Presidential Palace. Activists in Homs—the city with the best sense of humor—videotape themselves launching eggplant grenades. They yell, “We are your armed gangs!” and hurl zucchinis at the oncoming armed security forces. Hundreds gather in a main square in Bayada, Homs, and lay on the ground, motionless. In unison, they begin to whisper “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam.” As they rise slowly, so do their voices—until their shouts to topple the regime become a deafening roar.

And then there are the names they choose for the major days of protest. Friday, December 2 was known as the “Friday of the Buffer Zone,” when protesters were calling for the international community to create a buffer zone or humanitarian corridor to protect unarmed civilians from the regime’s military and armed thugs. A few weeks ago, protesters named the day “Your Silence is Killing Us” in response to the Arab League’s inaction on Assad’s brutality toward unarmed civilians. The named protests carry the Syrians’ messages to the world. To decide on these names, several ideas are proposed on a Facebook page and everybody—in Syria and abroad—gets to vote. The most popular name is then selected and communicated all over Syria. Welcome to democracy! For most Syrians, this is the first time they have been able to participate in a free and fair election.

Another example is general strikes. Students went on strike about a month ago in response to a new Assad “reform” measure under which failing students would be allowed to pass their courses. Elementary, high school and university students went out in protest, chanting, “No school until there’s no Assad.” Last Thursday, notices went out to Syrians via Twitter, Facebook and Skype, and from there, hushed whispers across entire communities, to declare a general strike. As it turns out, it is now illegal to be on strike—in other words, to stay at home—in Assad’s Syria. Being outdoors, however, carries its own deadly risks—whether from the tanks positioned at the entrances of every city, or the snipers tending their posts on rooftops.

Finally, Syrian activists abroad are taking bolder steps to assert their independence from the Assad regime. In Libya recently, activists hoisted the Independence Flag over the Syrian Embassy in Tripoli. In Cairo, a huge poster of Assad was placed in the street so that motorists could drive over it. During a recent protest in Washington, DC, horse manure was spread on a portrait of Assad. Syrian-Americans proudly snapped photos and immediately shared them with their friends and family in Syria. In Mississauga, Ontario, Syrian-Canadian activists conducted a flash mob at a popular shopping mall. At a designated time, all participants “froze” while watching YouTube videos of protests in Syria, while holding up Free Syria flags, and while displaying banners detailing the number of massacres that day.

These nonviolent expressions, taken widely as flagrant disrespect of Assad, would have been unthinkable before the revolution.

Protesters against Guantanamo in Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2008. Photo by Keith Ivey, via Flickr.

In a world full of injustice—from battered women to clubbed seals to the Club of Europe, from neglected children to nuclear weapons to mountain top removal, from torture at Guantanamo to torture at Bagram to torture in Chicago’s prisons to the torture of the death penalty, from famine in Somalia to deforestation to families being broken by Arizona’s immigration laws—how do you choose what to work on?

Most people choose what affects them most personally, what they feel like they can change, what breaks their heart. Some people choose what seems most strategic: if this small thing changes here, it might move all these other things along in the right direction. Some people race from topic to topic to topic, needing to be everywhere and in the middle of everything. Some combo of the first and second stance seems like the right place to be, right?

I start with all this because I have been thinking about Guantanamo. The notorious and often forgotten gulag is in the news again this week because the Senate voted on Tuesday to retain a provision within the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military detain terror suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial. In addition, the measure—which passed in a bipartisan show of fear-mongering and brutality—would close the door to civilian trials for terror suspects and place restrictions on resettling the dozens of men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release.

“Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as her fellow Democrats voted down Mark Udall’s (D-CO) amendment that would have killed the measure.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Feinstein’s words were true? But we don’t have to look as far at Guantanamo or Bagram to see people being locked up without charge. In fact, one of the tactics of the police’s response to Occupys around the country has been arresting people and then releasing them without charge—locking people up just to get them out of the way.

Back to Guantanamo. I have been working hard on this issue for six years. At just about this time in 2005, I was getting ready to fly to Cuba with 24 friends. We planned to walk to Guantanamo—right onto the U.S. naval base and visit the prisoners, spend time with the guards, and bring letters from the men out so that we could send them to their families. We got as close as the Cuban military zone that surrounds the base and there we fasted and prayed and maintained a 24 hour vigil for five days. We held a press conference and international journalists from many outlets based in Havana came to speak with us. We called U.S. Southern Command and the base constantly, alerting them to our presence and requesting permission to enter the base. We hoped that somehow—between our persistent prayer and our constant contact with authorities—the men imprisoned there would find out we were there and why. And they did. We don’t know how, but a month or so later, through a lawyer for a group of detainees, we received a message of gratitude and hope.

A lot has changed in those six years. Back then, there were more than 700 men at Guantanamo. George W. Bush was in the White House. Most Americans didn’t know much about the issue.

Today, there are 171 men who remain at Guantanamo, more than 60 of whom have been cleared for release but remain in detention because of White House cowardice, political horse-trading and Congressional intransigence. President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise to close Guantanamo, has replaced Bush in the Oval Office but not shuttered his terrible extra-legal creation. There are dozens of award-winning documentaries, countess important and informative books and thousands of column inches of news coverage of the prison, and even Harold and Kumar got in (and out) of Guantanamo.

But a lot hasn’t changed. Not for Shaker Aamer and the 170 others who are still at Guantanamo. But, we are still at it. Still trying. Why? Because we have been changed, maybe. Because the times demand our action and our effort. Why do I still care? Why am I still passionate about this issue after six years? Because in the name of justice for men at Guantanamo I have been pushed to do things I would have thought laughable and terrifying. To walk far and sleep on the ground, to go without food for days at a time, to court a big fine and possible jail time by flying to Cuba, to speak before thousands of people, to get arrested at the Federal Court, the Supreme Court, the Capitol, the White House, to stay up late and get up early and walk around in a decidedly unflattering orange jumpsuit in the January snow and July humidity. Because I have found an amazing community of people to work and struggle and weep and laugh with. Because no one is free when others are oppressed and shutting eyes and ears and hearts is not an option.

Right after New Year’s, Witness Against Torture is going to Washington again. I’ll be there. We begin our “Hunger for Justice” fast on January 2 and will fill the courtroom at Moultrie Superior Court the next day to support 14 friends who were arrested interrupting the House of Representatives with the call “shut down Guantanamo” in July. We’ll fast through January 11, which will mark 10 long years of detention and torture and lawlessness for so many. We’ll stand with Amnesty and Pax Christi and so many other groups in a human chain that will stretch from the White House to the Capital. We hope to have 2,771 people stand on that day, one for each of the men detained at Guantanamo and Bagram. The Center for Constitutional Rights will hold a press briefing and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture will host an interfaith service. There will be activities throughout the city to draw attention to this shameful anniversary. And then we will break the fast on January 12th.

To be honest, I would rather not go. I will be cold and uncomfortable and hungry. I will miss my husband and our little girl. But there are men at Guantanamo who paint amazing pictures of a life they can hardly imagine anymore. There are men who write poetry and who pray to God for justice, for release and for people like me not to forget them. So I won’t. That is my passion right now. Not forgetting, not getting comfortable with the suffering of others.

Twenty more innocent people were pepper-sprayed last week, although not by police cracking down on protesters this time, but by a woman fighting for a discounted Xbox at Walmart.

This was only one of many violent incidents that marred Black Friday last week, as throngs of crazed consumers hit stores across the country to get the best deals of the year, on what turned out to be the biggest day of shopping ever.

In an effort to push back against the frenzy of consumerism that overtakes our country every year at this time, Adbusters used the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to kick off their latest campaign: #OCCUPYXMAS.

As part of Occupy Christmas, Adbusters editor-in-chief Kalle Lasn suggested a few “shenanigans” that participants might pull off to the Toronto Star, including:

— a Santa sit-in, whereby protesters sit outside a store and encourage people to cut up their credit cards;

— a Jesus walk, where people put on a mask in the Holy Son’s likeness and walk through malls, to create an eerie sentiment;

— a “whirly mart,” in which would-be shoppers fill their carts with products but abandon them at the cash register.

Additionally, Abusters has called on readers to continue to move their money from big banks to credit unions or smaller local banks as “one great first step in breaking beyond the encampments and into the new Xmas imagination.”

Indeed, Bank Transfer Day earlier this month was a resounding success. According to a survey by the Credit Union National Association, in just the month preceding Bank Transfer Day, at least 650,000 people moved their money—totaling $4.5 billion in new deposits—to credit unions (as opposed to 80,000 new customers in a normal month), which inevitably underestimates the real impact of the campaign.

A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange.  It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.

Occupy Wall Street’s unorthodox approach to direct action was on full display Thursday morning as multiple columns of marchers encircled Wall Street. The flood of protesters stopped to chant or quickly moved on, depending on the density of police personnel arrayed to corral and disperse the crowd. Others sat down in front of barricades when the police refused further access to the public. This seemingly chaotic rhythm of the protest was, in fact, intentional.

For many days prior to the November 17 day of action, Occupiers met to map out the multiple stages of the action, noting the various intersections where police would try to bottleneck marchers, and devising routes of retreat that would allow them to re-group when faced with overwhelming police force.  In order to spread out the police presence, the march was staggered; different strands would leave minutes apart and aim for different access points to Wall Street. Although these general contours of the action were planned en masse, over a dozen affinity groups—self-organizing sets of volunteers—met on their own to plan actions-within-the action: some would break off from the main march to proceed directly to Wall Street through a Duane Reade on Pine; others planned acts of civil disobedience at strategic locations.

This organized randomness frustrated police tactics, which are best suited to corralling a single-minded mass. As a result, the police did as much as the marchers to block access to Wall Street, manhandling pedestrians and “freezing” intersections in order to stanch the unpredictable flow of protest. Perhaps the chief breakdown of police control occurred at the intersection of Broad and Beaver at around 10 a.m., where several strands of the march met after earlier sit-ins on Pine Street. Unprepared for this secondary flow, the police initially allowed the marchers to take to the street, dancing and singing—free from police violence, if only for a few minutes.

By noon, as sirens screamed down Broadway and over 150 protesters sat handcuffed in police vans, the march had sparked several articles on the front page of the New York Times website and hours of coverage on local and cable news. While the morning action had clearly succeeded in drawing more attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a certain skepticism haunted some of the news coverage: Was all that morning chaos really nonviolent? Did it work?

The unpredictable movements and the “diversity of tactics” employed by the Occupiers—from traditional civil disobedience to absurd dance routines—frequently cause police, spoiled by total compliance, to become panicked or enraged. The result is violent overreaction, as was witnessed on Thursday morning. On Pine and Nassau, night-sticks and bawled fists were deployed against a troop of green-clad and leaf-covered pixies; later, on Broad and Beaver, after their initial retreat in the face of an unexpected dance party, some creative officers transformed a metal barricade into a plow, using it to sweep up or knock down protesters.

Slightly earlier, police had shouted at a group of protesters twirling umbrellas, telling them to holster their rain gear. When the protesters refused to do so, an officer reached into the crowd and pulled one young, umbrella-bearing man to the ground; a circle of police formed to stomp on and then arrest him.

A minute later and a few feet behind the scrum, another officer found himself standing with the offending instrument. He pondered the medium-sized accessory for a few seconds and then, as if for the first time realizing what it was, collapsed the umbrella, tossing it—not ungently—aside, as you would upon arriving back home after a hard day’s work.

Although this carnival of nonviolent force and violent counter-force effectively attracts media attention, reporters have not quite come around to the stark imbalance between the nonviolence of the protesters and the oppressive reactions of the police. On Thursday afternoon, for instance, press reports became surreally fixated on a single act of violence that occurred back at Zuccotti Park, hours after the morning action. Apparently, a lone protester had thrown a mysterious “star-shaped glass object” at a police officer. At some point in its flight, the star cut Officer Matthew Walters’ hand and he went to the hospital for twenty stiches. Sharp, if vague, the glass weapon soared above the hundreds of thousands of words written about the “Day of Action,” as a premonition of what future, stellar assaults might be in the offing.

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood flanked by white-coated doctors at Bellevue Hospital to update the press on Officer Walters’ hand, photos circulated of a protester with blood pouring down his face. Reporters quickly explained why the 20-year-old boy deserved the cracked head: apparently he had thrown an AAA battery at one police officer and stole the hat off another officer’s head. If a bloody face is what you get when you throw a battery, one shudders to imagine what will happen if the police find the elusive star-hurler.

These violent acts should not be dismissed lightly. Yet there is an obvious disproportion between lone-wolf incidents of protester violence and the organized physical assaults directed by the police at lines of peaceful protesters—simply because those protesters stand on squares, sidewalks and streets where the police suddenly announce they don’t belong.

There is no doubt something forceful about protesters seeking to hold ground against riot police who deny their right to public sidewalks. There is no doubt something forceful about men and women who sit down in front of a police barricade and lock arms, as police officers shout at them. But these tactics of holding space are a clear, nonviolent rebuke to the array of police weaponry that rains down on demonstrators on a daily basis.

Four days after Thursday morning’s march, the New York Times and a dozen other news outlets fired off a protest to the NYPD: “The police actions of last week have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.” The letter recounted a scene from Thursday when police officers used a metal barricade to beat a photographer trying to snap a picture. Perhaps they had mistaken the flash-bulb for a flying star.

The past month has seen a startling growth in creative means to improve “communication” with the 1%. We’ll showcase three of the latest educational tactics. On November 3rd, for example, members of Occupy Chicago introduced Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to the mic check. An elite, obviously well dressed audience was saved from a potentially dreadful speech and disabused of any notion that “business as usual” can still occur, even in the elegant setting of the Urban League Club, without the participation of the rest of us.

Do note how seamlessly the protesters were embedded in the crowd. They had not only paid to attend, but had enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast and politely listened to speakers preceding the governor, apparently without raising the suspicions of security. Successful infiltration requires a detailed attention to current fashions, a quality sadly lacking in many Occupy circles. Fortunately, the Urban League Club had posted their dress code online. For those of you anticipating attending future corporate meetings, let me suggest perusing the fashion section of Billionaires for Wealthcare, or you might want to read this excellent posting on “How to Dress Like a Republican.”

The mic check intervention within “sacred” corporate space was preceded by a wave of flash choir performances (sometimes with dance routines) across the nation, highlighted by a very brave and moving musical occupation of a home foreclosure hearing in a Brooklyn court (reported on by Frida Berrigan). Some experts in the field believe the two forms can be fruitfully combined, a fact to remember for the upcoming season of corporate shareholders meetings. I’m told the timely purchase of just one share of a corporation’s stock will allow you to forgo burdensome fashion considerations when attending a shareholders meeting.

In Washington DC, organizers took a venerable American tradition, the outdoor movie drive-in, and on November 4th brought it to a gala reception of a Koch Brothers front group known as Americans for Prosperity. Projecting videos onto the walls of the Washington Convention Center, participants were treated to a “Guerrilla Drive-in” with free popcorn, lemonade and award-deserving videos. For those interested in hosting their own drive-in movies or flash billboards using the walls of their favorite banks, Esquire magazine recommends three digital projectors for outdoor use: the Epson Moviemate 72, the Optima HD 71 and the Panasonic PT-AX200U.

The video below catches the high spirits of the drive-in theater.

Finally, a group called Occupy the Board Room is circulating a brilliant idea for those who can’t attend corporate events or prefer the comfort of their own occupation zone. OTBR proposes adopting a corporate CEO or board member as a pen-pal and writing or e-mailing him or her. Their website notes that “Life gets awfully lonely for those at the top. What can we do to let them know someone’s thinking of them? Maybe they need some new friends!” It’s the spirit of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. The site allows people a choice of over 200 actual executives whose e-mail boxes you can choose to flood with helpful advice.

Carrying this concept a step further, a group of OTBR activists in New York decided that as long as they had written physical letters to executives, they might as well deliver them to save the U.S. Post Office unnecessary work. So with open hearts they set off together on October 28th to deliver their mail to Goldman Sachs, Chase and Citibank CEOs. They deserve credit for introducing the promising new chant “You have mail.” See the entertaining results in this next video.

What I really admire in each of these examples is their childlike simplicity. Not allowed to use an amplified microphone — ok, we’ll be the microphone. See that tall building’s blank wall — wouldn’t it make a great movie screen? We’ve written all these great letters, why don’t we go deliver them? It brings to mind Gandhi’s choice in 1930, when handed the task of launching India’s campaign for independence, of marching 200 miles to the sea and just picking up a pinch of “illegal” salt.

The innocent openness (on the surface) of adopting corporate pen pals suggests some tactics for the more confrontational mic speak engagements of the future. Elite audiences can be expected to adapt to unwanted interventions as was witnessed in a recent mic speak “discussion” with Michelle Bachman. Her supporters responded by loudly chanting “Sit down” and then “U-S-A, U-S-A.” Now ask yourself, using your eight year-old-mind, what is the job of a microphone when a speaker says “U-S-A”? Yes, join right in. Or we can improve the chant by preceding each “U-S-A” with an “It’s our…” and let the other side complete the sentence.

Mic speak presents wonderful openings for “turning” the negativity of the 1%. For example, if a main speaker finds fault with an educational intervention, they’re likely to shout something like “You’re interfering with my right to speak.” Mic speak effortlessly turns those words right back on the speaker. But I suspect it takes preparation by the infiltrating agents, much like a football team prepares for different defenses.

Opportunities abound. The 1% appears to be on the verge of learning that when the call “mic speak” goes out, their event has become the site of a General Assembly.

On November 17, the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 will come before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in a private hearing. It’s a bill that’s long overdue, as was its (rejected) precursor, the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, also proposed by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. If enacted, the bill would drastically reform the country’s current chemical safety legislation—the Toxic Substances Control Act—which, as it stands, is more loophole than not: a system so inefficient that in its 35 years, fewer than 10 chemicals out of 82,000 have ever been restricted or banned.

As researchers continue to investigate the breadth of the harm linked to chemicals exposure—from infertility and obesity to learning disabilities and autism—a range of organizations and activist groups are creating a movement for reform. The Safe Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign (SCHF), a national alliance representing over 11 million individuals, includes organizations ranging from Agent Orange Legacy (children of Vietnam War veterans), to Black Women for Wellness, to Consumers Union. But some of the biggest players, the front-line activists from Maine to California and everywhere in between, are moms.

Last summer, as part of a larger strategy to raise awareness, SCHF organized a series of nationwide “mom-led Stroller Brigades,” a type of guerilla theater. Moms and their children marched in red masks and capes, urging legislators to be “safe chemicals superheroes.” The action received enough press that it was repeated on November 10, in eleven cities. “Moms from around the country, excited kids, a great issue, and voila, a huge success!” the SCHF website reads, under the headline “A Recipe for Change.”

There are so many health-focused “Mom Bloggers” that SCHF has a special category for them on its list of members. Many of the blogs have a certain glamour about them, a chic eco-goddess feel. The moms talk legislation and lipstick in practically the same sentence, posting a call for female leadership one day (“Don’t get mad, get elected!”) and makeup endorsements the next (“Top 5 Green Beauty Tips for Fall”). This is Girl Power, all grown up. The mom campaigns include young women, high school and college students, who argue that chemicals exposure can impact fertility—and thus their potential and right to become mothers in the first place.

There are a lot of moms out there—it’s a powerful, angry constituency set on protecting their kids from formaldehyde-laced baby shampoo and lead-based face paint. And rightly so. Exposure to chemicals, particularly for children, is a massive national health issue, threatening both bodies and wallets. (Preventable childhood cancer, asthma, neurodevelopmental disorders and lead poisoning alone cost taxpayers around $55 billion per year.) But framing chemicals reform as a women’s issue—a mothers’ issue—opens a door for stereotyping, the idea that these women are over-emotional, looking for a way to fill their days as stay-at-home moms. Worse, the moms’ movement risks being viewed as elitist, a way for Whole Foods soccer moms to find meaning in their idle time. It’s the kind of framing that turns toxic chemicals into a women’s cause—which can, by virtue of its qualifier, be more easily dismissed than, say, a health cause. Or a movement.

There are, in fact, men’s groups working to raise awareness about chemicals reform, but much of the men’s activism that I’ve seen focuses primarily on fear of feminization. Skits, speeches and articles draw particular attention to estrogen mimics—chemicals that interfere with hormone receptors in the body—and point out that many deodorants and shampoos contain chemicals that can damage sperm and threaten virility. Chemical effects on the male reproductive system are a serious population-wide health problem, but all too often the real threats of hormonal damage are dismissed by critics.

Women in Maine celebrating Little Beard Day.

Consider Maine Governor Paul LePage, who, upon learning that the chemical Bisphenol A was an artificial estrogen, remarked that the worst-case result of its use was that “some women may have little beards.” In reaction to this blatant scientific miscalculation (since when does estrogen cause facial hair?), one might suppose that the state’s men would respond in defense of their own reproductive systems; instead, a thousand women dressed up for “Little Beard Day.” Which, by the way, LePage responded to by suggesting that the women develop a better sense of humor.

So, what’s the best strategy? The moms’ movement is strong by force of its numbers, and the anger driving it is appropriate and justified.  The trick might be in terminology. Communicative hooks and effective arguments can be most powerful in their subtleties: Let the stroller brigades draw attention to the kids inside the strollers rather than the moms pushing them. Refer to protests not as moms’ events, but as events for kids—rich, poor and everyone in between. Kids are the members of society most deserving of protection, simply because their bodies are the most vulnerable.

Activists in Maine have met success with this strategy. The 2010 Kid-Safe Products Act, a statewide chemicals regulation law, passed unanimously because, as one activist put it, “Who can justify voting against safe kids?” After all, there’s plenty of precedent for voting against women’s reproductive health and rights. But children? A different story. Whether or not the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 makes it to a committee vote, the fight for safer chemicals has a long way a go. But with the right framing, activists can get a lot more bang for their guerilla theater.

Yemen’s ongoing struggle is indicative of this year’s larger Arab Awakening in the way that women have assumed responsibility for speaking out politically.

My first awareness of Yemen’s Tawakkul Karman was a video made in Sanaa, Yemen, this past spring. In it (starting at about the 13-minute mark), her husband Mohammed explains that when they married she made him promise not to stop her from participating in public affairs, and he agreed. “She does something that I couldn’t do so I support her in everything she does,” he told Al Jazeera. He takes care of their three children and handles the callers on her cellular phones—plural—so that she can focus on the tasks of leadership. In October, we learned that Karman was one of three women who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, along with two Liberian women leaders, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Leymah Gbowee, for their work in nonviolent struggles for women’s safety and rights, as well as participation in building peace. A journalist and human rights advocate, Karman has become the personification of the Yemeni civil resistance struggle.

Karman’s organization, Women Journalists without Chains, was set up in 2005, and has maintained dual goals of a free press and a broad human rights agenda. She and her colleagues have been working for press freedoms and staging weekly sit-ins to demand that political prisoners be released from jail—a place with which she is well familiar—every Tuesday from 2007 until Yemen’s upheaval began earlier this year. In addition to addressing press freedoms, her group has demanded that inquiries be conducted into corruption and other manifestations of social and political injustice.

“I was threatened through phone calls, letters, even text messages. They said I’d be imprisoned or even killed if I did not stop causing inconvenience. But I consider taking my right to expression away far worse than any form of physical violence,” Karman told London’s Guardian. A few months later, in October, she met with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to express her fears, shared by the kaleidoscopic Yemeni opposition, that the world body will accept the contours of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plan that was advanced in April. The GCC plan, supported by the United States and Yemen’s GCC neighbors, would permit legal immunity for President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose abuses, crimes and atrocities against Yemeni civil resisters have only worsened in the period since spring.

In a remarkable convergence, and in a region thought to be impervious to nonviolent citizen action, the Arab Awakening has disclosed dynamic levels of participation of women in national struggles, called attention to the crucial importance of freedom of expression and a free press, and—as the Yemeni women on the front page of the Post show—introduced innovative uses of traditional symbolism in protest.

The use of symbols in actions designed to protest and persuade varies from culture to culture and setting to setting. It can also be affected by the sequencing of tactics and the stage of the struggle. Christopher A. Miller, in his handbook for African trainers of trainers, has distilled a range of such symbolic methods:

• On-person symbols: clothes, buttons, colors, hats
• Documents: petitions, open letters, reportage
• Lights: candles, signs
• Pictures: portraits, photographs, cartoons
• Paint: graffiti, murals, masks
• Sounds: bells, music, banging pots and pans, songs
• Acts: planting trees, donating books
• Gestures: facial expressions, hand gestures
• Destruction of one’s own property: identity cards, invitations

Symbolic tactics are explanatory as well as communicative. Their effectiveness can rely upon merely gaining attention, but often they actually play a role in guiding the course of a movement.

Miller’s handbook points out that the 1986 mass demonstrations in the Philippines were not as momentous in compelling President Ferdinand Marcos to resign as they were in drawing international attention and support to measures that ultimately pulled the power out from under him and led to his departure. These demonstrations also put the police services, security apparatus and military forces—which were responsible for enforcing sanctions—into a predicament in which they had to choose between defending the people or the regime.

Marches, processions and demonstrations—or any other method of protest and persuasion—do not attain objectives on their own, however. They must be utilized in concert with clear communication of the grievance and other methods that undermine or attack the bulwarks of support for an opponent. Used on their own, they may only throw light on specific issues. Although these methods are normally the first to be used in a nonviolent struggle, certain actions of this kind are also generally conducted throughout the course of a campaign.

Symbolic protest, especially when drawn from a treasure trove of traditional customs, can be a powerful way of combating the suppression of freedom of expression. Traditionally-sanctioned acts, such as the burning of the veils, can be especially well-suited to fighting repression. Their familiarity and antiquity makes them harder to suppress, and their legitimacy in the culture may actually be stronger than the present regime’s. The scope of symbolic methods of protest and persuasion, traditional and otherwise, is almost endless.

Protestors called for the immediate divestment of investments made by Wells Fargo and other major shareholders in private prison corporations such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group Inc., whose business models actively pursue harsher immigrant incarceration policies such as those seen in Arizona, Georgia and more recently Alabama.  The detention centers and prisons that these and other corporations bank on are often plagued with instances of sexual and physical abuse against immigrants who do not have access to legitimate legal recourse due to their status.

Peter Cervantes-Gautshi, (check out his highly censored story, Wall Street and Our Campaign to Decriminalize Immigrants), who was present at the Portland action, stated that “we wanted to show Wells Fargo that this movement is growing and that more and more people are becoming aware of their involvement in using tax dollars to put people in cages. They need to instead invest in creating good jobs for people.”

A delegation of demonstrators also entered the Wells Fargo building in order to inform the manager that failure of the bank to divest its shares from corporations that promote severe incarceration practices and policy will result in a substantial amount of customers closing their accounts. The manager was not present and the delegation was shuffled off to someone who, according to Cervantes, “had little authority and was less than helpful.” The demonstration outside remained lively and spirited as drivers honked in support and pedestrians gave their “thumbs-up” of approval.

Meanwhile in Kansas, Sunflower Community Action (SCA) held a Popular Education Assembly designed to educate the public on the connections between the new wave of anti-immigrant laws, the private prisons that lobby for them, and the bank that provided the investments to make it all possible: Wells Fargo. SCA is calling on Wichita to join people across the country in divesting from, and refusing to do business with Wells Fargo.

The protests are part and parcel of a series of nationwide demonstrations implemented by an impressive network of community organizations who have decided to heed the call for a national month of action. Through educational workshops, nonviolent direct action and concrete strategies for demanding shareholder divestment, the campaign intends to raise public awareness regarding the intricate and nefarious relationship between big business (aka Wall Street) and government within the rubric of the prison-industrial complex.

Previous actions have taken place in cities such as San Francisco, Minnesota and Denver, with more planned next week, including Wichita’s Zombie Crawl later today, where members of Sunflower Community Action, in solidarity with the OccupyWitchita movement, will present a theatrical memoir entitled, “Investments of Mass Destruction.”

These events have been particularly effective in tying together the multitude of seemingly disparate demands (the proverbial “laundry list”) that have come out of the Occupy movement. Organizers and spokespersons have proven adept at demonstrating and highlighting the fact that corporate-government collusion is the root cause of innumerable consequences of misery, inequality and poverty.

I see this campaign as one of the more effective and substantial movements to be explicitly aligned with the “Occupy” sentiment in that its primary participants and organizers are speaking directly to the reality of the most downtrodden and impoverished segment of the 99 percent, particularly the constituent members of our nation’s disenfranchised communities of color.

Yet the campaign also does not ignore the systematic targeting, dehumanization, humiliation and torture of those who aren’t even counted amongst the “official” 99 percent, namely the undocumented, whose only “crime” more often than not is earning an honest living through the provision of essential services that the “documented” covet and demand.  Yes, you can tell a lot about a person and a nation based on how they treat the “least amongst us.”

At the core, this divestment campaign isn’t about papers (no, not even the green ones); it is about dignity and unity. For what good is paper if it can purchase and/or confer the ‘legal’ right to kill, steal, exploit and imprison the innocent and hard-working with impunity? Our solidarity is, and now must prove to be, mightier than the dollar. Divest from corruption. Occupy Everything. Together as one.

“A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future,” proclaims Adbusters, the initiators of Occupy Wall Street. A key part of this re-channeling of tactics has been a move away from both angry protests or passive waiting-to-be-clubbed-by-police-batons to age old carnival-style antics. A festive atmosphere has reigned supreme in all of the successful pro-democracy uprisings of the past two decades. In Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia and Egypt, music and humor were everywhere. Why?

Musically, Eastern European rallies were powered by punk rock bands while in the Arab Spring, “hip-hop has become the rhythm of the resistance,” writes author Robin Wright. Tahrir Square, says journalist Sarah Carr, “was essentially a comedy explosion.” Tunisia was “a pioneer in revolution and now it’s at the forefront in comic expression,” proclaims the voice of Captain Khuzba, the masked cartoon hero who fought Tunisia’s secret police armed with a loaf of French bread. In Serbia’s pro-democracy movement in 2000, Srdja Popovic, a leader of Otpor (“Resistance”) reports, “Everything we did had a dosage of humor.”

Otpor is the organization credited with forging the nonviolent tactics used in the Arab Spring and earlier pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine. Founded in 1998 following a period of failed demonstrations by a small ragged group of twenty-somethings, it had within two years built a movement that overthrew Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Otpor learned early that humor could be a gigantic ice breaker, cutting through citizen’s fear and apathy and “turning oppression upside down.” They fine tuned the art of comedic resistance, added modern marketing techniques and the strategic framework provided by Gene Sharp.

The starting point for Sharp in From Dictatorship to Democracy is a recognition that, “The common error of past improvised political defiance campaigns is the reliance on only one or two methods, such as strikes and mass demonstrations.” His remedy was a heavy dosage of “low-risk, confidence-building actions.” Street theater and under-the-radar comic protests. Following this path, Mykhailo Svystovych, of Ukraine’s youth movement group Pora (“It’s Time”) recalls: “We didn’t do rallies with speakers, we did theatrical events.” The massive rallies we viewed on TV—this was the final chapter prepared by years of small guerrilla incursions.

Who were Otpor’s heroes? In interviews they list names we might expect: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and an unexpected source: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Stop the presses. What? How did those clowns sneak into the club? What is it about Monty Python-style humor that lends itself to deposing tyrannies? Let’s look closely at the exact laughter-creating tactics developed in these movements so you can judge for yourself—and maybe add to your own resume. Fortunately, excellent stories have been collected by authors Tina Rosenberg (“Revolution U”), Patrick Kearny (A Carnival of Revolution), Matthew Collin (The Time of the Rebels) and video producer Steven York (A Force More Powerful).

1. Flying Under the Radar

Dictators typically outlaw protest marches and give their security forces carte blanche to bash heads. In South Africa, blacks “solved” the problem by assembling large gatherings at funerals, the one kind of gathering the Apartheid government was not ready to ban. How could the deceased help it if she or he had tens of thousands of friends who wanted to mourn and follow the hearse through town? In Serbia, Otpor developed a tactic of “flash” protests, introducing a game called “Arrest the Traffic Lights.” People would mob street intersections and simply jump up and down while the walk lights were green. When the light changed they’d carefully obey the law and disperse only to resume their protest when the light said “go” again.

In Chile in 1983 labor unions made plans for their first test of Pinochet after 10 years of violent repression. Copper miners about to go on strike observed the large number of soldiers assembling by their mines and swiftly changed tactics. Instead of a strike, they called for a national day of slow movement. All over Chile, people simply drove, walked or worked in slow motion to express their solidarity. Later they banged on pots and pans at exactly 8pm. How do you arrest slow walkers or pot bangers? It’s a massive clown routine worthy of a Marcel Marceau. How could you not smile at your fellow slow motion actors? After that the ice was broken and an irresistible wave of protests began.

2. Obedience Parody

If protests against a government are being discouraged, and you feel a need to walk with a large group, you can always choose to march in “support” of the government. So Otpor paraded “for” Milosevic’s socialist party, but did so with a small herd of sheep with signs around their necks announcing “We support the Socialist Party.” In the Ukraine, student members of Pora (“It’s Time”) fought against the usurped election of their local tyrant named Yanukovych. He had a prison record so Pora members dressed up in prison uniforms and campaigned for him in the main streets of Kiev, Ukraine’s capitol. In Egypt, activists helped government officials by setting up Facebook pages for them and Twitter accounts so they could spread their messages. One official’s favorite activities were listed for him as: “Kicking ass, taking names, and wearing decorations with more colors than you can find in a pack of Skittles.”

In Poland in 1987, a group of “socialist surrealists” called the Orange Alternative (combining Communist red with the Catholic yellow) produced parodies of official events. On one April Fool’s Day they marched to the central square in Wroclaw to express their love of the government through a voluntary work day. Armed with mops and toothbrushes—which was very inefficient, I might add—they proceeded to clean up the square while singing socialist labor songs and dressing up like ideal workers from old Stalinist movies of the 1930s. Police again confronted the problem—what can you arrest them for? Cleaning up the square is a crime? Acting as fools gained protesters immunity from repression and a strengthened community of smiling co-conspirators.

3. Therapeutic Pies in the Face

If moving slowly together can help create community, imagine what collectively throwing a pie in the face of a dictator can be like. Otpor, in their most famous actions, brought out barrels with Milosevic’s picture on it and let people hit it with a stick for only one dinar. Those who were unemployed because of Milosevic could hit it twice for free. The police only looked ridiculous when they stepped in to, in the words of Otpor, “arrest” the barrel. Pictures of the “arrest” would soon be posted in the Internet. In Georgia in 2003, the group Kmara (“Enough”) created large banners where passersby could take photos of themselves flushing their president, Eduard Shevardnadze, down the toilet. In Ukraine, by 2004 the action had moved to the Internet where citizen’s could throw eggs at their soon-to-be-deposed leader Yankukovych, who had famously overreacted to a real egg throwing incident.

What is hitting a picture of a dictator but a version of the dunk tank? These actions go back to centuries-old carnival traditions of ridiculing the high and mighty. They crop up in movement after movement because they meet very basic needs. Throwing a pie at authority can be a low-risk participatory event with an appreciative community cheering one on. It’s not lazily watching Jon Stewart on TV—it’s physical action against authority, a physical break with patterns of passivity and isolation, a nonviolent re-channeling of simmering anger.

4. Idiocy Rising to the Top

Much of the humor of movements requires faith, a conviction that if you just set the table, the other side’s idiocy will provide all the humor necessary. For example, Otpor had their offices raided and computers hauled away. Knowing they had an informer “assisting” their activities, they put out the word they would be bringing in a load of new computer equipment. At the “secret” time trucks pulled up with heavy looking boxes. While laboring to lift these loads, the police intervened, only to discover all the boxes were empty. The story, with photos, went viral.

When Serbia’s government leveled charges that Otpor was a foreign-paid terrorist organization, Otpor took flatbed trucks and megaphones to the streets to denounce and expose the “terrorists” in their midst. They brought 17 and 18-year-old “terrorist” students in front of the public and grilled them about their activities. Similarly, in Egypt, when the government officials denounced the protesters for serving “foreign agendas,” young people showed up at Tahrir Square with plain blank notebooks, complaining they’d left their foreign agendas at home.

5. Absurdity Squared

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals #3 states: “Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.” Or any forms of rationality they might ever recognize. We enter here into pure Monty Python territory. Otpor, for example, would hold fake soccer games in the streets complete with uniformed referees and an imaginary soccer ball. Or they would hold parades in ridiculous fancy dress with no protest slogans, or gaily deliver cookies and flowers to police stations.

My favorite example is from the Orange Alternative in Poland. After the group carefully spray painted graffiti around Wroclaw, the police would come by and paint it over with white paint. This would leave unsightly white splotches on building walls. Instead of posting yet more graffiti, the activists took red paint and turned the splotches into elves. (Think of Hegel’s dialectic here – but on LSD). As more and more red elves appeared, this morphed into a demonstration where thousands dressed up in red and marched chanting “Elves are real!”

American activists will recognize most of the elements of the festive model. Certainly the street theater of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) or “Billionaires for Bush” anticipates much of the spirit of the pro-democracy movements. But what stands out in the new movements is the integration of the class clowns with the nerds, of spontaneity with nonviolent discipline. Traditionally people attracted to festive protests, group hugs and consensus decision making have been too laid back to organize effectively. The successful pro-democracy groups have managed to combine these elements with a caffeinated backbone of organizers who make the trains run on time and know when to shift gears.

Otpor leader Srdja Popovic, succinctly makes the point: “You can have 100,000 people in the streets and one single idiot who’s throwing stones, and he’s going to be the star of the day and this is how media operates.” The remarkable level of nonviolence maintained by these movements points to a concerted behind-the-scenes enforcement of a “no-idiocy” policy that leaves Seattle WTO veterans green with envy. Pro-democracy movements established clear boundaries within which a “diversity of tactics” could flourish. Former Otpor leaders now run the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade, which offers extensive training opportunities for inquiring minds.

Monty Python-style humor is rooted in centuries-old carnival traditions which, as Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has so brilliantly taught us, emphasize that all of us are fools and clowns just waiting to slip on banana peels. It has a humility that cuts through any vestiges of elitism or know-it-all political correctness.

Carnival represents the joyful life that stands as the total opposite of the zombie-like death of corporate rule. It’s what I believe allowed Otpor and other pro-democracy groups of twenty-somethings to bridge age and cultural gaps and build powerful movements.

Occupy Wall Street is a bold “experiment in truth,” which my stock analysts tell me should lead to a bull market in protests. Let’s keep a smile on it.

Last March, Colombian Minister of Education Maria Fernanda Campo proudly announced the need to reform higher education. Public and private universities took part in roundtable negotiations with the government in order to draft a bill that would integrate the different proposals. The bill eventually presented to the Chamber of Representatives in the National Congress the last October 4, however, seemed to many only to reflect the government’s interests, ignoring the previous deliberative process.

These are the bill’s features that the students find especially objectionable:

• Allowing private capital to fund universities to make up for simultaneously decreasing the investment of public resources, and forcing students to acquire debts.
• Threatening the quality of education by increasing the number of students, ensuring that the supply of teachers, laboratory equipment, computers and other infrastructure per student will decrease. In a public hearing last week, students spoke out against the “promotion of mediocrity” that they see in the bill.
• Encouraging a kind of education based on exploitation of labor rather than true development of skills for innovation and self-transformation. Students fear that they will be educated to “push the button, not to create the machine.”

There are, however, even more reasons for the student movement to reject the bill and the government’s policies generally: the lack of autonomy that it will leave universities with; the increase of spending on war and defense, which is eight times higher than the investments on public education; and, finally, the approach to education not as a right or a public good, but as a product.

Students began with familiar tactics like occupations, graffiti, marches and strikes. But, later on, police repression and the movement’s growth across the country fomented more creativity and diversity of actions. During the last two weeks riot police expecting a mob were surprised with dozens of students willing to hug them. Other actions included spreading information about the bill in question through fliers on public transportation, flashmobs in malls, film screenings, open canelazos (a national beverage used historically to gather families and people around the fire) inciting public deliberation, national student assemblies and nationwide strikes.

Two large protests have taken place, first on September 7 and then again on October 12. Colombia’s mainstream media tended to report just the violence and vandalism of a small minority of protesters, as well as a Ministry of Education statement claiming that 98 percent of students were against the protests. But the reality on the ground seems to look quite different—closer to just the opposite, in fact.

The students have set a deadline for the Ministry of Education to withdraw the bill on November 10. Otherwise, they intend to block the streets of all participating cities. In the meantime they are trying to establish a stronger relationships with national labor unions, parents’ associations and high schools students.

So far, the government had tried to quell the movement by adjusting a few words in the content and form of the bill—but its basic project remains the same. These changes occurred right after President Juan Manuel Santos visited Chile. His visit coincided with the emergence of a strong student movement there, the fear of having to deal with a similar situation within his own country pushed his government to make small concessions. But the students and the academic community remain intent on the total withdrawal of the bill.

With local elections taking place on Sunday, the students are preparing two new tactics. First, they will add a fourth ballot in the municipal electoral round, in which people will be able to vote for the bill’s withdrawal. Second, many universities are organizing a “collapse operation,” saturating the system with writs for protection of fundamental rights and rights of petition.

Public universities joined the national strike weeks ago, followed by some of the private ones, but now the key to success appears to be guaranteeing the support from private-sector businesses. If the private sector understands that its ability to create new technologies and innovate depends on a well-educated workforce, it too will demand that a new bill be drafted, thus pledging its real commitment to Colombia’s modernization.

The people who’ve come from around the country to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. helped fulfill their promise to “Stop the Machine” by entering, and ultimately closing down for the day, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. They chose the museum for its glorification of weaponry in general, its special exhibit on unmanned flying drones in particular, and the tribute it pays to the arms industry by naming its IMAX theater after Lockheed Martin.

Today’s action was proposed at Friday night’s General Assembly meeting on the plaza, most vocally by David Swanson—creator of, as well as much else, WarIsACrime.org. Some initially objected that its meaning might be lost on onlookers, but the idea prevailed.

The march itself—or “stroll,” as it was called, to avoid militaristic jargon—started around 2 p.m. today and reached the museum about half an hour later. Swanson was leading the march, together with members of Code Pink and a contingent of young Wisconsinites. (Also in the lead was confessed agent provocateur Patrick Howley, one of the “hundreds of earnest and principled reporters” whose careers The American Spectator claims to have launched.) Several protesters made it inside and, from the second floor, dropped a pink banner that said, “NO DRONES / END AFGHAN WAR.” But when as many as 500 “strolling” people surged up into the museum carrying signs and chanting, guards used pepper spray to repel them as they got just inside the doorway.

Protesters approach the doors of the Air and Space Museum.

Within seconds, those entering the building turned back, coughing and holding their eyes and writhing in pain. People outside, themselves breathing in the peppery air and coughing, poured water on their faces. Soon, there was a short standoff with police officers, followed by a rally on the steps of the museum and a performance by the Bread and Puppet Theater. Somebody provoked the man playing music across the street to go on a loud rant in his microphone against the protesters, but then he played songs for them. There was an assembly-style discussion. Several model drones—realistic-looking and otherwise—accompanied the group.

When word had come that some of those who had been apprehended would be released on the other side of the building, a group of marchers went there to greet them. They staged a sit-in, blocking the back entrance and singing songs like “This Little Light of Mine” and “If I Had a Hammer.” All the doors of the museum were already locked anyway, and it was closed for the rest of the day. Tourists continued to approach it and many went away angry.

Sit-in on the south side of the Air and Space Museum.

One woman was arrested in the incident, the first arrest of the ongoing occupations in D.C.: 19-year-old Thi Le of Madison, Wisconsin. She was released within a few hours and received by fellow protesters who waited for her outside the precinct.

Protester after trying to wash off the remains of pepper spray.

The outcome of the confrontation remains to be seen—especially in whatever crowds might come to Freedom Plaza on Sunday. An incident with pepper spray was of course a turning point for winning public sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, and it may be again in D.C. But in the case of Wall Street there was no apparent justification. At Air and Space, however, despite the use of probably excessive force by the guards, many outside observers might also see it as a necessary measure of crowd control to protect a national museum. The protesters say they had no intention to damage anything—later on they chanted to police officers and guards, “We are peaceful!”—but this might have been made clearer from the outset.

According to messages on Twitter, members of the separate occupation that began on October 1 at McPherson Square on K Street have made a point of distancing themselves from the action.

Despite some complaints that the reason for targeting the Air and Space Museum weren’t obvious enough, the action surely made a lot of people think about the museum and what it represents in a new way. The signs and props protesters carried conveyed their opposition to ongoing wars abroad and to the celebration of weapons that goes on inside. There were a large number of people visibly identified as veterans taking part, as well as military family members. The idea of going to a museum to admire technologies designed for killing was certainly called into question by this action. Unlike the sites of Occupy Wall Street confrontations, which have occurred on roadways, the target here made sense.

Less successful at first glance, however, was the tactic that ultimately met with pepper spray. The protesters could have sent a powerful message without appearing so threatening to guards, much less to visitors inside. The banner-drop was an example of this. So was the sit-in. But when a large, loud crowd leaves the street and moves toward a building, those leading it should be aware of the effect that they’re having on those in their path, and of the ways they might be antagonizing the very people they’re intending to win.

Movement-building, though, isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it burns.

At the time I happen in, discussion among the core group—twenty or so people sitting cross-legged in a circle—has to do with image. What kind are they presenting? “We should wear khakis,” someone suggests. “Khakis and polo shirts. A suit if you have one. It’s one thing to see hippies in the street—,” a few mutters, “—but it’s better if some businessman can walk by and think, hey, that guy looks like me.” Modest applause.

“But that’s the whole point,” someone says, “that we’re not suits. We’re the people. This is what the people look like.” This being sweatshirts, jeans, beanies, hand-rolled cigarettes. More cheering. And a third suggestion: that there’s no need for one uniform, it’s better to have a variety of looks. This gets the most cheering of all.

The cheering, I should mention, is silent–there’s a whole system of hand signals that I’m just beginning to catch on to. Wiggling fingers means approval. A triangle formed between the thumbs and index fingers means a point of order. This quietness, I gather, is part of a thoughtful system of self-policing, the goal being to strike a balance between attracting attention and irritating passers-by. Protestors draw each other out of the way of pedestrians, and reprimand each other for littering. One man, realizing that his smoke is blowing towards me, apologizes at length and pulls me in front of him, towards the center of the group. “You should be able to listen without getting gassed,” he says, disgusted, despite my objection. “God, I am so sorry.”

The quiet lasts until a city bus passes and the driver honks, two long beeps—sure, there’s a lot of wiggling fingers, but even more whooping. When the ruckus fades, a man pumps his fist. “She’s in a union!” he says.

More discussion: The protest now has 5,000 Twitter followers, and its website, occupychi.org, got a record number of hits. $1,100 raised in donations, plus more food than they can eat before it spoils. What they really need are ponchos and socks. Someone’s going to lead a meditation class. Someone else is teaching yoga. Another bus drives by, and everyone cheers even louder than the first time. Nobody cares that it didn’t honk.

There are committees: a treasury committee, a press committee, an art committee, a bicycle committee. “If anyone asks you why you don’t have a job,” someone says into a megaphone that doesn’t work, “hand them your resume and ask them for one. And if you have a job, tell them! But if you don’t, join a committee and really put your time in. Your new job is to make a change in this country.”

How do the police feel about this? “They brought us coffee and food at the beginning,” says Guy Fawkes. “But now that they know we’re serious–well, let’s just say I haven’t seen any donuts lately.”

The signature tactic of this revolutionary year, it would seem, is a mass protest in a large, symbolic public space. We saw it in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, and then in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square in Athens. Now, in the U.S., the October 6 movement is planning to take over Washington’s Freedom Plaza, while another coalition has been planning to do the same on Wall Street on September 17—tomorrow. (For a basic account of what’s going on with the latter, see my report from earlier this week.) If you want to get something done, apparently, the way to do it is to take the square. And this is exactly what the people at Adbusters had in mind when they made their initial call to occupy Wall Street, observing that “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future”; they continued, “We want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

There’s a problem with this, though, and one sees it on the flip-side of 2011′s revolutions. There was Egypt, yes, but there was also Libya, Syria, and—tragic, too, but far less reported upon—Bahrain; each of these cases showed how public protest, Tahrir-style, makes a movement extremely vulnerable to crackdown. We at Waging Nonviolence were biting our fingernails throughout the initial Tahrir Square protests, filled as the place was with throngs of people in the open air, surrounded by tanks and soldiers. The protesters trusted their army, but maybe they shouldn’t have, for they were (and now still are) at its mercy. What really won the day, in the end, was not simply the highly vulnerable Tahrir crowd, but a coordinated, distributed, nationwide general strike that crippled the entire country’s economy until Hosni Mubarak left office. The crowd alone wasn’t enough. Gene Sharp, after all, has identified 198 different kinds of tactics that nonviolent civil resistance movements employ, and many more are imaginable—why stick to just one?

So, Wall Street. Manhattan’s financial district doesn’t have a Tahrir Square or a Puerta del Sol. It’s a cramped, confusing area full of narrow streets and tall buildings. It’s architecturally cold and thoroughly militarized. Even if there were the 20,000 people Adbusters wants to see, no one area could hold them all. Further, if a mass of protesters clustered together too much, police would have little trouble isolating them. A relatively quick dispersion seems highly possible on Saturday, and it may be disappointing to some who traveled from far and wide to take over that part of the city en masse. But, in fact, among those who have been thinking hard about the occupation for the past two months, it has become largely a matter of agreement that dispersion is part of the plan.

From the outset, the NYC General Assembly’s Tactics Committee has been discussing contingencies in the event that a mass assembly gets broken up: just break up. That’s okay, they think. Discussions are more inclusive, anyway, when a smaller number of people is involved. The General Assembly as a whole actually agreed at its last meeting that, on Saturday night, everyone should aim to disperse into smaller sub-groups in different areas of the Financial District. These little assemblies are to focus on coming to consensus—taking however much time they need—about what’s wrong with the system, what their vision is for a better future, and what it will take to get there. According to the tactical plan circulated by US Day of Rage, one of the major promoters of the effort, protesters should even consider spreading throughout the whole borough:

We consider the entire island of Manhattan and even the Citicorp building in Long Island City, Queens to be ‘Wall Street’. The NYPD may kettle or blockade Wall Street, but they cannot kettle or blockage [sic] Manhattan.

There are worse things than not getting to have another large public protest in the streets of New York that accomplishes little. It has been done before. According to New York City law, permits are necessary for groups of more than 20 to gather legally in public parks—so why not gather in groups of 19? Why not conduct small, legal, and still powerful actions like those that #occupywallstreet activists have been conducting throughout this week, such as yoga classes where Wall meets Broad and declaring guerrilla free-speech zones with free wireless internet access? What if this were happening on every corner in the city, for weeks at a time?

These days, nobody is more masterful with dispersion tactics than those behind the Jasmine Revolution in China. Working in an environment of extreme, ruthless oppression, they’ve learned to be very creative. Their signature move is the so-called “strolling” protest: large numbers of people gather at a public place, designated over the internet, and walk around innocently, looking up at the buildings and ignoring each other. Obviously, there’s a protest happening, because there’s a huge crowd of people in one place, and a phalanx of police are watching. But how do you distinguish a protester from a bystander? You don’t. You can’t, really. You’ve created a disruption, but no targets, and no actual illegality. Meanwhile, people become less afraid to resist when they know that others are with them.

When the Chinese protesters want to hang a subversive banner, they don’t just tie it to some building where it can be easily taken down; they attach it to a hot-air balloon and let it loose in the middle of a big city. There, everyone can see it and nobody can remove it until the military revs up its anti-aircraft batteries and shoots it down, making the shooters themselves look foolish—they’re shooting down a balloon. That’s a textbook dilemma action.

Many people in the NYC General Assembly have concluded that their goal right now is not so much to announce a demand as to build a movement, to break down the habits of business-as-usual and get the public to imagine that a different kind of world is possible, while taking steps toward making one actual. They have to create a broad-based, powerful uprising if they’re going to obstruct the influence of money in politics with their own human capital. Staging a massive, centralized, unified protest mob is one impressive way, perhaps, of doing that. But it’s not the only way. It may not even be the best way.

In any case, the organizers have made it clear that their main priority is not some kind of futile clash with the police, or an orgy of tactical masterminding. The goal is to be inviting, rather than to scare potential allies off by dwelling too much on what the police will do. That’s why they’ve planned to start Saturday—well before the 3 p.m. assembly at Chase Manhattan Plaza—not with the building of barricades but with the making of art: a New York Fun Exchange, which begins at noon around the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green, just south of Wall Street. Get ready, too, for the Michael Jackson flash mob.

The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it’s true. The large, established, membership groups—unions, lobbies, etc.—have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can’t be counted on en masse. There’s no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there’s no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, though its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor Micah White, solely “philosophical.”) Saturday, among other things, will be a test of the scattered American grassroots—their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.

Some on the right-wing’s most lunatic of fringes have taken advantage of the information vacuum with headlines declaring “Wall Street Targeted for Britain-Style Riots” (along with thoroughly fictitious links to ACORN, SEIU, and even President Obama), a claim which has already turned into a fundraising scheme for Republican political candidates. Imaginative, but false.

A better place to look for some sense of what’s in the works would be a visit to the “NYC General Assembly” that has been meeting for the past month or more on Saturday evenings in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. For as long as five hours at a time, a crowd of 100, give or take, discusses matters of process and principles, as well as peanut butter sandwiches, bathrooms, and pepper spray. They can’t pretend to be able to tell all the people who come what they can and can’t do, but they can at least provide a loose framework and some information about what is and isn’t legal—for example, no tents. They’re not bringing any port-a-potties or appointing any marshals or police negotiators. They talk about nonviolence, with various conceptions of it in mind, and hope for the best.

The group is mainly young, with a tendency toward black T-shirts, bicycles, and hand-rolled cigarettes. A few have accents from Spain and Greece, through which they share stories from this year’s uprisings in those countries. They vary in their levels of experience with the modified-consensus process that the Assembly employs—together with its concomitant courtesies, no-nos, and hand signals. There are those who have never done anything like this before, and then those who are coming freshly-inspired and well-rehearsed from taking part in the three-week Bloombergville encampment earlier in the summer. There’s a contingent from the LaRouchePAC, and there’s a big, bearded man in the back who, against the wishes of some, keeps snapping photos. A police car cruises by from time to time, but it doesn’t stop.

Their stories are ordinary, but in a charmed sort of way. One regular at the Assembly moved to New York from North Dakota on a whim, and without a job, a few months ago after finishing a master’s degree and breaking up with his girlfriend; almost immediately he found out about September 17 and has been working on the Arts & Culture Committee full-time. Another is a filmmaker who has just been in Egypt interviewing the leaders of the Tahrir Square protests. Yet another is a Vietnam vet from Staten Island with a sagely smile. Still others drift by through the park, stop to listen, and then keep walking, or stay.

Decision-making hasn’t always been easy. But this past weekend, at least, the Assembly decided when it would meet next, as the occupation begins: on Saturday 3 p.m. at Chase Manhattan Plaza, two blocks north of Wall Street. The Arts & Culture Committee will get things going beforehand with a “New York Fun Exchange” (as well as a possible pooch parade) at noon at Bowling Green, home of the Charging Bull statue. The student groups, who have their own allied General Assembly, are rehearsing for a flash mob. And more: the Fiasco Street Team, Protest Chaplains, the National Lawyers Guild, Guerrilla-Drive-In, and a promise on Twitter about an old band coming back together the day before. Every day this week at noon, there’s occupation-themed public yoga session where Wall St. meets Broad St.

Few groups taking part are more organized, though, than US Day of Rage. Its founder, a sharp-featured, sharp-tongued IT strategist named Alexa O’Brien, insists that she’s “a normal sort of nobody.” She and her colleagues are prolific on Twitter, and their website features a range of resources, including nonviolent direct action manuals, a tactical plan for September 17, and an embedded YouTube video of the group’s official song, the theme from the 1970s show Free to Be… You and Me.

US Day of Rage also has a head start on answering the question that Adbusters posed in its initial call: “What is our one demand?” O’Brien launched her site back in March, while she was blogging about the Middle Eastern revolutions and the revelations coming out of WikiLeaks. On Twitter, she asked people what they thought was wrong with this country, and it all seemed to come down to one thing: the influence of big money in politics. This led naturally to the group’s slogan, a plan for radical campaign finance reform: “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” Besides that, O’Brien refuses to label herself or the organization with any ideological stamp.

“I think it’s really typical of the internet generation,” she says, “to look at process much more than ideology as what’s going to save us.”

There’s a certain ring to this proposal; it has the makings of what Buckminster Fuller called a “trimtab”—a simple change that could change the course of the whole system. But it’s far from a universal priority among those organizing for September 17. Others have called for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, or imposing higher taxes on the rich, or ending the endless wars abroad.

What one mainly hears at the General Assembly, though, is not a demand so much as an experiment in method. They’re trying to figure out how to make their voices heard again in politics, above the noise of money. What’s drawing people to Wall Street on Saturday sometimes seems to be an aesthetic more than anything, a longing to see Wall Street full of the people whose concerns its operations have been blind to, and who are ready to get their due. But it’s an aesthetic with teeth. After what has been happening in Egypt and Tunisia, in Spain, Greece, Bahrain, and so many other places around the world this year, people are going to Wall Street to make a real difference.

But September 17 isn’t just happening on Wall Street. For its part, US Day of Rage is organizing actions that day in Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle as well. (Washington, DC will have to wait for the occupation of Freedom Plaza planned for October 6.) Meanwhile, Take the Square, a network that grew out of the Spanish May 15 movement, lists solidarity demonstrations across Spain, as well as in Italy, England, Canada, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Israel, and France.

And then there’s the internet. Ever since the news began circulating that Anonymous hacktivists would take part, there has been a lot of speculation online about what they might actually do. One hint comes in the form of Operation Lighthouse, “a fully legal operation in support of the wall street occupation on the 17th” which, in its promotional video, is branded as an Anonymous project. It has also been billed as a revival of New York’s embattled Critical Mass bike ride. According to the website, though, “The @oplighthouse [Twitter] account was suspended shortly after the operation was publicly announced.” Fully legal or not, someone is on to it.

This is a reminder that, while Anonymous’ entry gave the September 17 effort tremendous momentum, it’s a mixed blessing. The FBI has been stepping up its scrutiny of the group lately, and what the Guy Fawkes masks add in mystique and internet-savvy may be lost if the authorities use Saturday as a chance to make an example of Anonymous, especially if protesters aren’t ready to turn a crackdown to their advantage.

Something, in any case, is definitely going to be happening. A lot of people are definitely going to be there, though 20,000 seems pretty optimistic. Some will know what they’re doing more than others, and all will learn. Not only will this weekend be a test of Americans’ readiness to resist, but of whether an idea lobbed into the internet by Adbusters, then grabbed by artists, students, Twitter hashtags, and a shadowy network of hackers (and hacker wannabes), can really turn into a “flood,” a show of meaningful political force, a new way forward.

“These are new organizational forms that haven’t been tried yet, at least in the U.S.,” said Isham Christie, a graduate student at the City University of New York, speaking at a meet-up in the back of a bar in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “This is the definition of a truly radical movement.”

Most of the planners I’ve spoken with believe it’s best not to decide very much about what the action will look like before they’re on the street. This will make it a lot harder to control, but also, potentially, harder to defeat—like the uprisings in Egypt, Spain, and elsewhere. September 17, if it is anything yet, is an ambitious, risky, magnificent unknown. So much depends on who actually ends up being there. Will you?