Full text of speech I delivered yesterday, in radically truncated form, at Occupy Edmonton’s first “Occupy 2″ rally at Ezio Farazoane Park. The speech given by two good friends of mine was much more explicitly Revolutionary, and I’m hoping they’ll let me post that here too sometime later today. But here’s mine, interspersed with photos of the various speakers at the rally, and photos of Occupy Edmonton after we reached the University of Alberta, where we held our first U of A General Assembly in the plaza in front of University Hall.

Thank you’s

We are a pivotal moment for Occupy Edmonton. Phase I is over, and we are moving into phase II.

I want to take a moment to lead us in some thank-you’s to people who were so important to Occupy I.

Campers. The core of Occupy I was our occupation of the square at 102^nd Street and Jasper Avenue, and the symbolics of that camp were huge, and what was achieved there, unforgettable.

Let us thank every person who spent even one night sleeping at the square.

And let us give a special thank-you to those dedicated campers who stuck out night after night, especially those campers who stuck it out to the very end.

Donors. The press may not know who you are. Even people standing here today may not know who you are, but to each and every one of you, no matter how large or how small your donation, we owe you a heartfelt thank-you. We thank you for your donations of wood, water, clothing, bedding, money, and time, energy, and spirit, and we thank esecially those people who served as our legal observers on eviction nights. Please join me in thanking all of our donors and legal observers!

Occupy Wall Street. And thank you to Occupy Wall Street for giving us crucial support in the form of $7,500 for the winterizing of the camp. We couldn’t have gotten through that without them. And I assure you the equipment they have helped us buy will be put to good use. Thank you Occupy Wall Street!

Our key spokespeople. Every protest movement, even a leaderless one, depends vitally on spokespeople – people who are prepared to put themselves on the line in a special way by stepping up to a media microphone and speaking on our behalves. It’s never easy speaking for a group, especially a group like this, which is contributing to a momentous moment in history by trying to bring into being a global movement. So let’s thank our core spokespeople! Thank you, Mike Hudema! Thank you, Chelsea Flook! Thank you, Mahad Mohamed! And thank you Amy Bursey!

Thank you spokespeople!

Rob Butz. A lot of people feel that we ought to be thanking Melcor for letting us stay at the square at 102^nd Street and Jasper Avenue. The person I think we ought to be thanking in regard to the fact that Melcor let us stay at the square for 42 nights – well, 42 nights and a part of a 43^rd – is Rob Butz. Rob Butz wrote letter after letter to Ralph Young, CEO of Melcor, on our behalves. He also spent a lot of time on the phone with Melcor representatives. And we owe Rob a huge thank-you for all of his diplomacy and patience. I truly believe that we would not have been at the camp as long as we were if it had not been for Rob Butz as our bottom-liner Melcor liaison.

Please join me in thanking Rob!

Thank you, Rob!

Our marshals. We also owe thanks to our dedicated crew of marshals. I haven’t met all of the marshals, but I have met Kirk Hansen, and David Laing, and Mo Mohamed, and Alexander Miller, and Bryn MacDonald, and I have been truly inspired by the wonderful calm energy that all of you brought to the camp.

You were there, on dedicated long shifts, day after day, and night after night, to make sure that someone was always on the spot and awake to take care of any camp emergencies, and that’s included dealing with the aggression that was directed at the camp by many who wandered into the square.

So let’s thank our marshals for helping to keep the camp a safe space!

Thank you, Marshals!

Journalists. And let’s thank those local journalists who wrote a kind word about us, or who at least did their best to objective in their coverage. You know, those journalists who reported what we were doing without judging us. Those journalists who made a good-faith best effort to do their jobs. And let’s hope in Occupy 2 more journalists will try to play that role.

Thank you journalists!

[crowd not particularly enthusiastic on this front]

The police. And I think we should thank those members of the Edmonton Police Service who have treated us as if we were an auxiliary peace force upon whom they could count for some key help at night. So thank you to the police who have respected us and made it possible for us to respect them in turn.

Thank you, Police.

[crowd even less enthusiastic about this]

Our special three.

Can we all thank the three people who got arrested on our behalf in the early hours of Friday morning: Chris Dunne, Josh Sealy, and Bill Thomas?

I know there’s some feeling in the press and the wider community that the fewer people there were at camp, and the fewer people who were ‘arrestable,’ the less seriously they have to take this movement.

But that’s not how I see it at all!

The fewer people who endured through thick and thin, and the three who permitted themselves to be arrested, are a special ‘few’ amongst us, a special ‘few’ to which a famous Shakespeare speech that runs ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ applies.

Let us, we happy few, thank those special three who got arrested for this ‘bank of brothers’ and sisters.

Thank you, Bill!

Thank you, Chris!

Thank you, Josh!

[crowd very enthusiastic indeed!]

* * *

Those thanks were not exhaustive.

They couldn’t possibly be.

That’s the nature of this movement.

In Occupy I, people came and people went and we may not know all of their names.

But I’d like now to talk about Occupy II, or phase 2 of Occupy Edmonton.

And ultimately I’d like us all to issue an invitation today.

But first I want to talk about some of the things that have been said in the press about us.

‘Comical demands.’

In the aftermath of our press conference at the square last Tuesday, in which we passed a list of eight demands that we would want to see met before we voluntarily left the square, we had one columnist for the Edmonton Journal call our demands ‘comical.’ And we also had a professor who is a political scientist from a local university go on one of the local TV channels’ evening broadcasts and declare our demands ‘too utopian.’

I’ve already addressed the Edmonton Journal journalist in print, and I’ve asked her to think what it means for her to dismiss our demands as ‘comical.’

But now I’d like to say a word about what it means to call our demands ‘too utopian.’

‘Too Utopian.’

I don’t know how many people know this, but the word ‘utopian’ is drawn from a sixteenth-century English book written by Thomas More, Utopia, which was about an island in a far-flung location outside Europe, where the people had organized themselves to hold all of their wealth in common.

So they would bring in the harvest together, and eat all of their meals together, and party together, and wore humble garments, and rejected gold.

‘Utopia’ means no-place meaning that More was writing about a place that did not actually exist, but which ought to.

And it has a passionate defender in the book, in a character who has the name of an angel, Raphael Hythloday. He’s the one who has voyaged to Utopia and returns to tell the tale about it.

More wrote that book at the outset of developments on the planet that saw the rise of a system that we now take for granted, capitalism, as if there were no other way of being, no other way of organizing ourselves as humans, no other way of organizing the planet.

And Hytholoday speaks passionately about Utopia because he wanted Europe to take it as a model, so it could save itself from a system in which he said sheep were ”devouring men.”

What Hytholoday was referring to was the enclosure of land by feudal landlords, who were increasingly using the land to feed sheep for wool production rather than using it to grow crops that would feed people.

This was what is known as the first enclosure movement, and it was fought, in the sixteenth century, by rebellion after rebellion in which the people consistently fought for another relationship to the land, and the commonwealth, in which all would be cared for, not just the feudal landlords who owned land and could turn their land over to the grazing of sheep because that was more profitable to them.

In my view, Occupy is continuing that battle against the enclosure of land and resources that allows a few, a very few, to benefit at the expense of the many;

a few, a very few, to live a beautiful life with wealth stolen from the rest of us, while so many suffer – so many go without homes, and without adequate food, and without a proper education, without the very things they would need to fight back against their oppression.

So when a few, a very few of us, stand up in a small square in the centre of a Canadian city to make demands that would reverse the depradations that capitalism has wrought upon the world since the sixteenth century, and is now wreaking more drastically than ever, in the form of globalization.

[Side-note: I was so grateful that Derrick from Occupy Red Deer had already spoken at length and so eloquently about how historical forms of enclosing in North America involved the seizure of Indigenous lands by Europeans.]

Globalization is letting a few, a very few take over all of the resources of the planet while the rest of us stand by gasping – and many of us, in other parts of the world, starving as a result.

And I as one of the people standing up against all of this, as an Occupier, will not accept the dismissal of our demands as ‘comical.’

Let’s make life equally beautiful for all.

Just because a way of organizing the world that would ensure that life can be equally beautiful for all does not yet exist – is currently nowhere to be found in any form – does not mean it cannot.

This is a movement that calls upon us all to believe in the possibility of another world.

This is a movement that asks us not to accept the world as it is, in its current exploitative form.

This is a movement that asks us to reject the idea that just because the world is currently one way we do not have the strength and the imagination to reorganize it.

Are our demands ‘too utopian’? Hardly!

Those who resist the demands – those who cannot say how sane and eminently necessary they are; who do not want to put their shoulder to the wheel to help bring them into being – I say they are too conservative. Too privileged. Too content to find it acceptable that others go without homes and food and education and so many other things just because of the socioeconomic class in which they were born.

I say that anyone who dismisses our demands as ‘comical’ or our ideas as ‘too utopian’ is lacking in imagination.

Idealists!

As Mike Hudema said at the press conference earlier this week, yes, we are idealists! And we are idealists because that’s exactly what we feel the world needs: more idealism! More thinking about what we might be! More commitment to what might now, in this moment, seem impossible, but which will not prove impossible if we will commit to the ideal, and do everything we can to translate our ideals into realities.

What we need to do is come together as an imaginative force to create the world that we want.

And our few needs you to join us against that other few!

My special plea (for free post-secondary education)

While I’m speaking about ideals, I want to say a word about one of the demands that was on our list on Tuesday, the call for free post-secondary education for all.

I’ve heard people speak of this as if this were one of the more ‘utopian’ ideas, and one of the least achievable.

And I just want to offer some quick perspective on that.

UN Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976)

This demand seems ‘utopian’ only because Canadians have forgotten something really important, a commitment we made in 1976 when we signed on the United Nations Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

Article 13.1.c of that covenant reads:

1. (c) Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.

If I’d been helping to write that document in 1976 I would have said, hang on, guys. We can’t qualify it. Everyone who wants a postsecondary education should at least be able to begin a degree paid for by the people of Canada. If they can’t make it through their first year, fine, but everyone, if they want it, should have a chance.

I would also say we can’t have a ‘progressive’ introduction of it.

The introduction of it needed to be immediate.

Half measures won’t do with this sort of thing, and they didn’t do.

You can find all kinds of statistics on-line that will show you what happened to that commitment:

From 1977 onwards, what did Canada do?

We allowed for tuition fees to increase, and government contributions to decrease.

We shifted the financial burden away from us, as the government, onto individuals.

We made the decision that it was acceptable to us for education to become a commodity like everything else that only some would have enough money to buy.

As a result, the students at our universities are treated as the customers of a corporation supplying them with a product, in the form of a degree, rather than an education, and it is increasingly difficult for students to get an education for education’s sake.

It is increasingly hard for them to get an education in the Arts and the Humanities because the corporation is acting as if IDEAS and teaching people how to think – how to think critically, and how to be imaginative about the world we might create – are not goods in and of themselves.

The Corporatization of the University and Ideas

The corporatization of the university – and this applies to all universities across Canada – is consistently saying ideas are not profitable.

Being the source of ideas will not get you a job.

Study something practical, and forget about ideas.

Well, all I want to say is in such a cultural climate IDEAS become the most precious thing we have.

And those who want to think them should be dear to us.

Thinkers & Dreamers

Those who agree to launch into an ‘unprofitable’ Arts degree are making exactly the kind of commitment that Occupy asks us to make:

They are committing to learning about the past, and learning about philosophy, and reading the texts — historical, philosophical, theoretical, and literary – through we have expressed and continue to express what ideas we should value.

And we need to make it possible for everyone who wants to to gain those ideas – to become a thinker and a dreamer – on our dime. Yes, on our dime. Because in the end we all benefit from the thinkers and the dreamers.

We should be spending our money on post-secondary education, rather than on military fighter jets or jails, because we believe in the powers of the human imagination.

We believe in the power of the human imagination and how it might bring about a planet in which there is no need for war, and in which it will nurture us all in such a way that there is no need for jails.

Join us!

And today we ask you — especially those of you who have been seated on the sidelines so far, wondering where this movement is going — to join us.

Join the campers and the donors and the marshals and the letter-writers and everyone else who was involved in Occupy 1, as we begin Occupy 2.

Join us in thinking towards and dreaming about a better world.

And do that by coming to one of our General Assemblies.

Come to our General Assembly at the University today!

General Assemblies

General Assemblies are the heart of this direct democracy movement.

They are how we contribute to radically transforming the world in a way we cannot do with representative democracy, which alienates us all from the halls of the power, and lets rich men manipulate our political leaders behind closed doors.

We’re willing to do what we can within the traditional forums of representative democracy, and we showed that by showing up to City Hall earlier this week for the public hearing on the 2012 budget.

We showed up to City Hall because the proposed $10.5 million in service cuts is not acceptable to us, especially not when the City is prepared to let one of Canada’s richest men have such a sweet deal in building a new arena here.

But representative democracy is not enough. Representative democracy has failed us. We need something different.

We need to remake the world from the bottom-up, and our General Assemblies will be vital to this.

Invitation

Come to our General Assembly and hear our ideas and share yours, and join a movement without leaders.

A movement of bottom-liners that would change the world from the bottom-up rather than exploit it from the top-down.

A movement of bottom-liners who needs you to commit to our idea and our idealism so that, idealists all, we we can govern ourselves, and order the world, in a way that makes it beautiful for all.

So please, march across the bridge with us today to the University so that we can all share our ideas at the place that is supposed to be the most important sanctuary of dreamers, thinkers, and idealists in our culture, our University.

I hope to see you there at 3.

Thank you.

Onwards, over the High-Level Bridge and to the University of Alberta

Check back for further bulletins from the Dreamers & Actors of Occupy Edmonton from one who is amongst them.