Labonneviveuse
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for mike hudema
Organizing Thoughts 11: Join Us, the Bottom-lining Idealists!!
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 102nd 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 102nd 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 43rd – 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:
- (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 want to be a student! I want an affordable life!"
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.
David Staples: Right place, wrong attitude. Come try again!
Dear David,
At 5:21 p.m. yesterday, you posted an article to your Edmonton Journal blog about the press conference held yesterday by Occupy Edmonton. Your article shows that you showed up, in your professional capacity as a writer for the Edmonton Journal, but that you did not actually hear what was said. You heard a little, and you rushed back to your computer to write a piece based on a single sentence that was uttered, and in so doing you failed to perform your professional duties in good faith. I’m really sorry to see that because with your choice you let down a lot of people, and not just the people at Occupy Edmonton. You let down every reader of the Edmonton Journal. You let them down by entering the square for yesterday’s press conference with your ears closed to the “message” that you are, in your article, declaring “wrong.”
I’ve got the pictures to prove it. Here’s one:
David Staples (left), Mahad Mohamed (right)
Perhaps you were counting on your little recording device to do your work for you, and thought there was no need in the meantime for you even to look at the people who were speaking.
Or perhaps that was just one errant moment on your part. Human nature is such that it’s hard for any of us to give anyone our undivided attention. You took a break, it seems, and looked at the ground. But if that’s the case, what do we with this?
David Staples (left), Mahad Mohamed (right)
And this:
David Staples (left), Mike Hudema (right)
I’m going to assume that you did manage to meet Mike Hudema’s eyes here, when you had your microphone thrust in his face:
Mike Hudema (center), David Staples (facing him)
But if this is indeed you in that photo, and you were able to meet Hudema’s eyes then, apparently that wasn’t an act you could sustain:
Mike Hudema (left), David Staples (right)
Let me be clear: I had no intention of capturing you in any of these photographs. In fact, I had no idea who you were. I was simply, as one member of the group standing behind the Occupy Edmonton microphone yesterday, taking photographs to document the event for us. It was only when I was reviewing my photographs afterwards that I saw how often I had inadvertently captured you on film.
I wonder what you think of what you see here. You certainly don’t look like an avid reporter to me. You look to me to be a very reluctant spectator. I therefore find your choice of metaphor for yesterday’s event fascinating.
In your post to your blog this morning, you have called the event “protest theatre.” Apparently, it’s “theatre” that you find boring, or inconsequential, or to which your response is entirely cynical, and these responses have interfered with your ability to cover the event with anything that even approximates comprehensiveness or objectivity. Your response is simply to declare that the “curtain” ought to “come down” on the show.
I have no problems with your metaphor in and itself. In my professional capacity as a professor at the University of Alberta, I happen to teach the work of the most famous writer of Western culture, work that we might fairly characterize as “protest theatre.” In fact, I would go so far as to characterize it as amongst the most powerful forms of “protest theatre” that Western culture has yet to produce. But your use of the metaphor and the terribly limited account of the “play” that you have offered over the last twenty-four hours suggest to me that you yourself have no sympathy for the genre, or anyone who takes part in it.
For what do these photographs show us?
They show us that you showed up yesterday as a paid representative of a newspaper to hear a message that you refused to listen to. What an abdication of responsibility! You were “on the job,” and you were there on behalf of many people who could not be present. You were there on behalf of all those members of the 99% who were at their 9-to-5 jobs, and could not be there in person. You were paid by the Edmonton Journal to be there as the representative of all those people, so that the messages communicated at the press conference could be shared with them. On the evidence of these photographs, David, what do you make of how you are presenting yourself as a representative of Edmontonians?
As someone who works in the field of communication, you must know this: psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that the whopping majority of communication is non-verbal. Over 90% of it, so the theory goes. And of that 90% more than half of the communication comes in the form of body language and facial expressions. That was the half of the communication that with your eyes fixed on the ground you couldn’t possibly hope to receive.
Nonsense, you may want to respond. I heard everything that was uttered. I was focusing on what was being said. I didn’t need to look at any of the speakers. I was listening to them. Well, think again. Research has proven that our failure to take in one form of communication, the non-verbal, interferes with our ability to take in what is being communicated by words.
But we could leave science out of it, and consider the role you were playing in far more prosaic terms. When you chose not to look into the eyes of the people who spoke yesterday, even when they were speaking directly to you, you were engaged in non-verbal communication. You were playing your role in the “play.” And that role was not that of a journalist making a good faith attempt to hear everything that was being said.
The photographs suggest exactly what your subsequent posts at 5:21 p.m. in the evening and then again this morning at 9:19 a.m. prove: you weren’t sufficiently present to hear the message. You have declared the message wrong, but you didn’t actually hear what was said. Or, to put it more bluntly, you didn’t get it. Contrary to what you have declared in your headline, you were in the right place, but you couldn’t be bothered to bring to that place the right kinds of eyes and ears.
The list of demands that Occupy Edmonton presented yesterday is complex, and I’ll write a bit more about it elsewhere. But here I’d like to ask you, David, to think about the act of selection you made when — out of the many, many things that were said yesterday! — you chose one sentence to focus on.
Is that really fair journalism, from your perspective? Did you feel you could spend so much time staring at the ground, rather than fully attending to the complex, multi-faceted piece of “theatre” to which you were audience, because all you came for was one reactionary sound-bite? Did you feel that was all the public needed from you, as their representative? You came to get one statement, any statement, that would permit you to write a piece that would help alienate Edmontonians from what is going on in the square at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue? Is that really what you are content with, from yourself as a journalist?
Sure, it’s easy to do the job that way.
It’s also always really easy to take only the role of critic.
It is so much more difficult to sympathize with, and attempt to understand, something you don’t get — something that you may find threatening because the message involved is one to which you cannot relate, from your position of privilege.
And so you show up with the volume on your ears turned down to low, and your eyes focused on something other than the speakers before you.
You are exactly the kind of person for whom the message on this sign, in a photo taken by me a week and a half ago, is meant.
One of Occupy Edmonton's dedicated marshals, photographed on 12 November 2011
David, meet David. David Staples, you were at the right place, but you were shut up somewhere so deep within your own mental palace that you heard the wrong message. For to hear only part of any message, and then judge everything that was said on the basis of that one little part, is always to get the message wrong, no matter how much the state of journalism in North America at the moment may encourage you to believe otherwise.
Could you please think about this? What might you have written if you had properly heard and thought about the list of demands that Occupy Edmonton presented at 11 a.m. yesterday morning?
What might you have written if you had, for example, heard Mike Hudema ask, rhetorically, “Are we idealists? Yes. But we think we should have a little more idealism.” Or to Anna Sparkle when she said that the group is responding to a global movement that “fills our hearts and dreams”? Oh, you may think, I can’t listen to these nonsensical dreams! Well, let me tell you when you make that decision, my friend, you take your place not only on the wrong side of this movement, you take your place on the wrong side of history. For history shows us over and over again that those who denounce the dreamers and idealists of any given cause are always eventually on the side of those who lose against the dreamers. It may take time, but the dreamers always in the end win. The dreamers themselves may get stoned, or thrown to the lions, or beheaded, or burnt at the stake, or shot up against a wall, or rolled over by tanks, or pepper-sprayed, or beaten with batons, or tortured in dark cells, but the dreams themselves always prevail.
But, all right, let’s think of the matter another way. What if you had done a little bit of research in relation to the list of demands, which include the demand of free post-secondary education for all, to remind yourself of a little bit of history? You know, so you could give the demands themselves fair consideration. Consider, for starters, the one that is closest to my heart, as a professor, the demand for free post-secondary education for all. This is a demand to which Canada was in theory fully committed thirty years ago when it signed on to the United Nations covenant in this regard in 1976. A generation ago, before Reagonomics and Thatcherism took over Western culture, this was a dream that people believed in. And this is one of Occupy Edmonton’s many functions: to remind us all of the kind of thing we might dream, and the kind of dreams we should fight for.
And so I ask what you might have written if you had truly heard the message of Occupy Edmonton, which is in part that we all agree to dream big together, to dream big about the world that we might bring into being if we committed not to producing a wealthy elite but committed instead to producing collective wealth? And if we started with fundamental steps such as making sure that we are all well-fed, well-housed, and well-educated? So that every dreamer amongst us has a proper chance to contribute to a new just world?
What might you achieve if you opened up your ears, and used your eyes, and took in what is actually happening down at the square?
Here’s the good thing: we’re still there! You still have your chance! Why don’t you come back down to the square today and try to do what you were so unwilling to do yesterday before rushing back to your computer to write your terribly limited and close-minded response to what you didn’t properly witness? Why don’t you come back down to the square with willing ears, and attentive eyes, and most importantly an open heart, and then see what “message” you receive?
Think about it, David. Think about the world we might have if even a few others began to join the brave few down at the square to bring their talents and their expertise to bear upon what is unfolding. You have something very special you can bring to that, for as a journalist you are a public voice. How do you want to use that voice, David? Does your privilege and your cozy economic situation really make it impossible for you to hear what is being said at the square, and to pass it on? Which side are you on, David? Which side are you on?
But if you really do want to be thinking about what role property is playing in all of this, why not turn to a very famous French book on the subject written in the nineteenth century? It’s called What is Property?, and it’s by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Read that book, and you will furnish yourself with entirely different ways of answering the very questions you posed in your post yesterday evening. If you were asking those questions in good faith — asking them because you really wanted to understand what Mike Hudema meant when he said what you chose to fixate on, “The right for us to raise [our] voice is more important than a rigid respect for property law” — then Proudhon’s one of the best intellectual places you can start to formulate a more well-informed and thoughtful answer. Reading the book would be one way to take yourself to a new place, and from that place you might find yourself able to contribute to this movement.
I refuse to believe that you could not choose to write something else than what you wrote yesterday.
And since you turned so readily to a theatrical metaphor in your post this morning, let me leave you with some phrasing from one of Shakespeare’s most stirring plays with the hope that it may resonate through your “mental palace.” What might you gain, David, if you came down to the square and joined us — “we few, we happy few” there — for a real conversation? And then wrote about that conversation with a generosity of understanding? That is what is needed from our local journalists, and Global TV certainly showed a good deal more generosity yesterday when it chose as its soundbites the ‘dreaming’ quotes above. Global TV took a step in the right direction. I’m sorry that you did not.
Wishing you well, David. I truly hope that with these two places to start from — conversations down at the square or some reading on your own — you will eventually understand that you were in the right place yesterday, and that’s a place in which you are welcome, and a place from which you could do so much good.
You’ll have to excuse me. I now have to write a letter to your colleague Paula.
Yours sincerely,
A doctor of humanities who is also an Occupier
Labonneviveuse 