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I don’t want to be blindly supportive of the Occupy movement.  I don’t want to blindly condemn it.  I don’t want to be blind at all.  In a movement as experiential as this one, joining in is the best way to learn.  I’m describing myself as an embedded journalist-activist, and, while I largely support the movement’s (ethereal) goals, I’m retaining some measure of aloofness.  From a journalistic perspective, this lets me critique the movement while being involved enough to feel like I’m part of a real and constructive conversation, rather than acting like a distant analyst with little connection the emotions and ideas this movement is bursting with.

My friend Noa and I arrived at Burnside Park at about 3:00 AM last (Monday) night, and after several interviews, fell asleep to the sounds of laughter and walkie-talkies, in a seven-person community tent (open to all; first come, first served).  As early as 5:00 AM, cars drove by honking in support of the signs all along the fence around the park.

I’ll be staying here for the rest of the week.  I’m posting now from the tent I’ve set up for myself and other Brown students.  Noa took all of the pictures here, as well as more which can be found on my Flickr.

Artemis: The Red Tape Army

Artemis (known to all here as “Ma”) is coordinating the Red Tape Army, which began as a small corps of medical volunteers, and has expanded its duties to include general hospitality tasks such as distributing blankets and food.  Another one of Artemis’ stated goals is to hug every single person who comes through the park.

From 1999 to 2001, Artemis was homeless, living on Thayer Street on College Hill.  The Finlandia co-op often provided her with food, and she also recalls sleeping on their couches regularly.  From our conversation, it was readily apparent that she remains highly aware of the unique challenges the homeless face; much of her work here is in a sort of unofficial homeless-outreach capacity.  She buys the homeless “kids” $1 pizza at the nearby 7-11, and has brought a lot of them into Occupy Providence by helping them out in this way.  Her compassion for the many homeless who were already living in Burnside Park when Occupy came in, as well as for those who’ve joined after, is readily apparent.  She told me of a homeless man whom she helped out one night; he returned the next day to tell her “Because of you, I didn’t commit suicide.”  She says “That’s what it’s about – I don’t care about the political end.”

It would be easy to decry the members of the Providence homeless community as free-riders; they’re benefiting from the donated tents, blankets, and food and drink that Occupy is collecting and distributing.  However, the Occupiers consistently show an impressive amount of camaraderie with the homeless, who otherwise remain invisible to society in many ways.  This kind of solidarity through cohabitation and direct action is a testament to Occupy’s willingness to live out its principles of inclusion.

In yet another display of the pragmatism I’m discovering in all corners of Occupy, Artemis fully understands that we’re in a tenuous situation here.  Of the future of Occupy Providence’s physical presence, she remarked “The cops have been great, but we’re pushing it now.”

Felicia: “We need to be heard.”

Felicia is a member of the Red Tape Army.  She was working the 2-8 shift when I talked with her outside the main medical tent.  She’s in business school, and got involved in Occupy on Saturday night.  She came back after church on Sunday, and has been here ever since.  I started to ask her about some of her reasons for being here, but was interrupted by a squawk from her walkie-talkie; all the medical volunteers carry one.  Once she confirmed that she wasn’t needed, we continued.  ”I can’t really pick one thing,” she responded when I named a few of the reasons others had given for their involvement.  ”We need to be heard.”

Felicia, too, underscored the message of respect for the police.  ”If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be here.”  She also spoke about respecting the park and keeping it clean.  I asked her about next steps – she wants Occupy to start talking to politicians, joining and organizing rallies at the statehouse and City Hall – to be heard everywhere possible.

Going forward, a focus on visibility of the kind Felicia expressed will be vital.  If Occupy doesn’t continue to expand into new areas, to bring in new attention, energy, and ideas, it will stagnate.  To really be heard, we need to constantly look for new ways to express ourselves.

Dave Taveres: “I am a capitalist, but at the same time, that doesn’t give you the right to take advantage of people.”

I stopped Dave as he walked along the edge of Burnside Park, observing the signs and the tents clustered inside.  He works in Pawtucket (he described his job as “blue-collar”), and has seen Occupy’s presence here when he takes the bus at Kennedy Plaza next to the park.  He’s worked a lot with the homeless in the past, and agrees with Occupy’s messages of opposition to corporate greed – he feels that the government doesn’t care about this problem.

His quote above is reflective of a lot of the sentiment I’m picking up here.  Many Occupiers communicate a genuine sense of betrayal – they really feel that they’ve worked hard and that society has failed to recognize and reward them for it.  Occupy is far from the only movement to hold this sentiment, but it’s a powerful one.

Annie: “These things take time.”

Annie has been homeless for the past 3 months, and declined to have her picture taken.  She became closer to Occupy last night, through Artemis.  She doesn’t know many of the Occupiers or the other homeless, and rightly observed that Occupy Providence is “a fledgling group.  It takes time.  These things take time.”

The homeless community seems to be a much bigger part of Occupy here than they do elsewhere.  I was particularly interested in hearing more about what they need from the movement.  Annie said that she could use help finding housing – but she acknowledged that Occupy has a lot of other priorities as well; “the peace movement, and social justice.”

“Winds of change.  Winds of change going on,” she told me.  ”I think a good socialist movement is necessary here in RI and throughout the country – it’s time for change.  It’s a movement whose time has come.”

I spent about an hour on Sunday afternoon at Occupy Providence in Burnside Park, interviewing occupiers, taking pictures, and trying to get a general sense of the tenor of the movement.  I was motived by dissatisfaction with most of the reporting I’ve seen on the Occupy movement.  The tendency seems to be to do some obligatory man-on-the-street interviews, and then turn the footage back over to in-studio talking heads to make points they were going to make anyway.  In other words, Occupy is being used to reinforce existing narratives about politics, social issues, and class.

However, most social movements have compelling narratives of their own.  Occupy is no exception.  I encountered a multitude of viewpoints on a variety of issues.  Perhaps most informative were the responses that Occupiers gave when I asked for their opinion on potential problems with the movement.  I decided to do this because I wanted to break the paradigm whereby protestors state goals and pundits critique them.  I wanted to hear the movement’s critiques of itself: what might go wrong, what needs to happen to “succeed,” what “succeeding” will actually look like, and so on.  I didn’t get answers to all of these questions, but I’m planning to go back, and hopefully to camp out for at least a couple nights in the next few days as an embedded Occupier-journalist.

Here are some of the stories of the people I met today.  All photos are mine, except where otherwise noted, and are available under a Creative Commons license (details).

Gretchen and Arrash Jaber: “More than just politics”

Gretchen didn’t specify her education level – she’s currently employed full-time as a mother (the couple’s son was at the tent with them).  When I asked why they were there, Gretchen told me she wanted to “be a part of making a change.”  Arrash has a bachelor’s degree and is currently employed.  He feels that the Occupy movement isn’t a purely political one – he listed “cleaning up the city [Providence]” as one of the things he thought local Occupiers could organize around, in addition to some more hypothetical concepts like uniting globally with the working- and middle-classes.

In my experience, when a nonviolent demonstration begins to treat the police as its enemies, it immediately begins to lose both moral and practical high ground.  During the hour or so I spent at Occupy Providence today, I saw Providence police officers engaged in friendly conversation with various organizers.  Arrash put words on this phenomenon: he wanted the demonstrators to respect the police and to talk to them.  I pointed out that the police are often part of the very same working class that liberal social movements commonly try to represent – he agreed emphatically.

The Providence Fire Department has also lent material support to Occupy Providence – they donated three tents, which were at the time of my visit being used for media.  The fire department had even gone so far as to label one of the tents (click for larger images):

Jonathan Lewis: “This is what an activist dreams about.”

Jonathan is self-employed in nonviolence training.  He’s the founder of the Positive Peace Warrior Network.  After driving by Occupy Providence yesterday, he decided to return to camp out.  I asked him about the way forward – could Occupy’s success in physically bringing people together be translated into legislative action?  Would the movement’s grassroots energy need to be sacrificed?  He replied that it’s “not an either-or” – that it’s about “displaying unity” between these two fronts.  His enthusiasm for in-person organizing was balanced by this pragmatic approach to the messy process of electoral politics – another good sign for Occupy as it progresses.

Kyla Coburn and Andy Trench: “Targeted change”

Kyla and Andy work together as interior designers.  They’d just arrived at the park with their two children when I met them.  Andy was largely on kid duty, so Kyla did most of the talking – Andy said they shared the same brain anyway.

One of Kyla’s primary concerns was message clarity – she believes it will be absolutely vital in order to move Democrats.  She expressed a personal desire to see Occupy coalesce around a message of “targeted change” toward corruption, rather than descending into a fiasco of “shaking a stick at the haves from the have-nots.”  As we talked, she repeatedly underscored that she wasn’t there in support of a platform of anti-capitalism, but one of anti-corruption.  This stands in strong contradiction to claims made by conservative media figures implying (or explicitly stating) that Occupy is a cover for socialists (gasp!) or something else equally scary and “un-American.”

I pressed Kyla on the details of message centralization.  By what process should this be accomplished?  At what level?  She wants to see Occupy’s message unified nationally and articulated into ten points to be disseminated, and is concerned that Occupy’s potential, namely its grassroots nature and wide appeal, could also undermine it as the “Republican media” (she named Fox News in particular) use soundbites to discredit the movement as a whole.

In too many cases, movements become bifurcated as organizers attempt to control the message while members seek to retain individuality.  The fact that the individual members of Occupy are concerned with this issue is a very good sign.  If Occupy does begin to articulate a national platform, I hope that individual members of the movement will be as receptive as Kyla was hopeful.

I’ll wrap up with a quote from Andy Trench, which was echoed by Michael McCarthy, one of the main organizers of Occupy Providence:

People can’t take for granted that other people are going to do that work for them.  They have to come down here and actually put that time in.

Occupy Providence is on Facebook and Twitter.  Connect with them there for ongoing updates, and stay tuned here for more interviews, photos, and thoughts on the movement as a whole.  I’ll also be tweeting during my camp-out in the park – follow me on Twitter @renaissanceboy.

As promised, here are the two handouts that Mayor Higgins provided at the Northampton city budget forum last Thursday.  Both are PDFs.

City of Northampton State Aid and benefit Costs

City of Northampton FY12 Budget Issues

I attended a forum tonight on the Northampton municipal budget, and its relation to state budgetary processes.  The mayor of Northampton, Mary Clare Higgins, our State Representative Peter Kocot, State Senator Stanley Rosenberg, and City Councillor Pamela Schwartz (also the director of YES! Northampton, a group that advocates for the preservation and enhancement of local revenue to fund basic services such as education) all presented.

It was a really terrific overview of the challenges our community faces in balancing the budget without cutting local services such as education (which is the single largest expenditure in our town).  It was also immensely refreshing to listen to dedicated politicians who weren’t afraid to talk about the facts and back it up with data.  It’s a stark contrast to the anti-intellectualism so often proudly displayed at the federal level.  In other words, I like knowing that the folks I elect to my government have an actual interest in, well, governing.

Here are the notes I took, which are as exhaustive as I could make them.  I’m getting in touch with the offices of the Mayor and Rep. Kocot, who were both more than happy to provide me with a copy of the materials they brought with them, which are really instructive.  As soon as I get those (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll post them here as well.

In the Northampton area, community preservation boards and other such groups hold a lot of sway, or at least have a lot of effect on public opinion.  In my particular neck of the woods, the North Street Neighborhood Association (NSNA) commands quite a bit of lawn sign real estate and visibility.  At most public forums, they can be found handing out information or gathering opinions on various projects that would affect zoning ordinances and town property management in our area.  While I think it’s vital to have citizen watchdog groups like this, especially single-issue ones that are quick to note the side effects of various policies on their particular area (in this case, land preservation and local ecological systems), we have to keep things in perspective.  Invariably, material progress in land allocation, and more theoretical societal progress in how we perceive our relationship to the land will both leave some people out of the fold.  The question is who, and at what cost?

A good example of this sort of calculation can be found in this Gazette article: Amherst Historical Commission troubled by possible razing of old farmhouse, barns.  The key issue we’re dealing with here is the balance between historical preservation and current, more mundane, community needs (in this case, a ballfield).

The case for preserving the farmhouse comes from a belief that the town shouldn’t necessarily purchase and utilize more property – that it should work with the space it already has, particularly when not doing so endangers historical sites.  The case for replacing the farmhouse with something else is that it doesn’t really serve any practical purpose, especially since it’s “not salvageable.”  In this case, I think the latter opinion is a bit more realistic.  I certainly appreciate the desire not to steamroll over everything that’s existed before simply for the sake of a new field – historical artifacts shouldn’t be subject to the whims of city planners or housing officials.  On the other hand, the farmhouse as it is isn’t contributing to any historical objectives.  It’s not being used in a Historic Amherst exhibit, nor is it habitable or usable for anything.  It’s just taking up space.

But are ballfields really the most important thing to be built?  What if this land was used to create subsidized public housing?  Certainly we could use more of that.  This whole issue shows a lack of long-term thinking on the part of pretty much everyone involved.  Reflexive urban and suburban development is clearly not the way to go.  But neither is reflexive resistance to the same.  Rather than calling for the same thing in every situation, single-issue groups like Historical Commissions, or the NSNA should be there to raise red flags and then work with government officials and citizens to determine what’s in the community’s best interests.

Law enforcement keeps the streets safe.  Everybody knows that.  We grow up learning that the police’s job is to put bad guys in jail, and that the streets are safer because of it.  And in popular media, the public defense system (in my opinion, one of the most important services the government provides) is treated solely as an obstacle to putting the bad guys in jail.  Police have to “get to” criminals before they “lawyer up,” as if getting a lawyer was somehow a shady move on a criminal’s part, just one more step in their deceitful lifestyle.  No, actually getting a lawyer is a right.  And getting a fair trial is in the constitution.  But to see the way public defenders are portrayed – underhanded characters who wear bow ties and will do anything to help a rapist walk free – you’d never know it.

There’s a certain type of law enforcement or prosecutorial worldview that I see as the root of that disparagement of the public defense system.  It’s the tough-guy attitude to law enforcement – someone did something wrong and we’re gonna lock ‘em up for it.  There’s no room for analysis or understanding of why they did something wrong, or what the best solution might be.  Nope, we’ve got firepower and sentencing requirements (which, aside from taking away an important tactical tool from prosecutors – the ability to bargain with defendants using sentences – leave no room for nuance), and we’re going to use them.

While I have infinite respect for the work that police do, and I believe that the law is the law, no matter how much we’d like to change it in some ways, we have to notice that there are other things going on.  The crime-and-punishment loop has done nothing for this society.  While our incarceration rate is higher than anywhere else in the world, our society is a far cry from crime-free.  We breed criminals by inducing poverty (particularly along racialized lines), making guns easily available, and refusing to address the negative social impacts of gambling, drinking, and the ramifications of heavy-handed drug policy.  And as we privatize more and more prisons, offloading the work of handling rising numbers of inmates to private corporations, we waste more and more resources on a penal system that hasn’t delivered the results we need.

Lots of smart people have called for a better way of doing things.  So how does this relate to the hotly-contested race for District Attorney in Massachusett’s Northwestern district?  Well, electing one particular Democrat over another here won’t single-handedly bring about the necessary penal reform.  But that’s precisely the point.  The way to change these things is from the bottom up.  Gun control laws won’t be coming out of Congress any time soon because the NRA is way too powerful.  Neither will penal reform, for the same reason.  It’s up to us to elect lawmakers and law-enforcement officers whose view of law-enforcement’s role in combating crime is more grounded in reality – that is to say, who recognize that there’s more to safety than arresting criminals and putting them in jail.

Dave Sullivan is that candidate.  He has the necessary legal and managerial experience to run the office, and he has lots of ideas on how to make it better.  While it’s easy to just stand around and criticize people for not doing their jobs, Dave has concrete ideas on how to improve things.  He’ll assign community prosecutors to work locally with various agencies and institutions, create civil and human rights advisory boards in the DA’s office, and issue an annual report and citizen’s guide to the office, so that the public knows where resources are being allocated.

Dave understands that crime prevention is also an important part of the DA’s job.  He has fresh ideas on how to engage with the community to help prevent crime and report signs of it before it begins, breaking out of the crime-and-punishment paradigm.  This sort of approach is necessary in order for the DA’s office to have a positive impact on people’s lives, and I just don’t see the same commitment to it from his opponent.  Obviously, others may disagree on how best to respond to and deal with crime, but I believe the data supports my viewpoint that putting more people in jail doesn’t address society’s problems.

We need a DA who understands not only the power of our legal system, but its drawbacks.  This well-rounded view is emblematic of someone who is ready to use all the tools at his disposal to improve public safety, not just the conventional ones associated with prosecution.  It’s clear to me that Dave Sullivan is best equipped to take on the responsibilities of the DA and to carry them out in a sensible, nuanced manner, and, in doing so, to effect the sort of change that’s necessary to move beyond our broken view of law enforcement.

Make no mistake, there genuinely are people who need to be prosecuted for crimes.  But there is also danger from an unequal or unfair application of that prosecutorial power.  Dave’s ideas on reforming and improving the office will result in better allocation of resources and better partnership with the community, two things we can’t do without right now.

For all of these reasons, and more, Dave Sullivan is clearly the best candidate for Northwestern DA.  I’ll be voting for him tomorrow, and I hope you will too.