Occupy ousting: A chance for organization, an opportunity to strengthen protest roots

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UMaine occupiers may have gotten it right — if you don’t set up camp, police can’t ransack it at 1 a.m.

If you return to your dorm every evening, you won’t have a tent city for sanitation crews to demolish. If you keep going to class, you won’t be around when the handcuffs start snapping.

But you will still get your weekly hour of dissent, which I assume is similar to your 15 minutes of fame — abruptly over and swiftly forgotten.

While the Occupy UMaine movement fails to measure up in scope to other occupations, it’s one vital strand used to weave a tenuous, tumultuous web.

After a red-eye raid on Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protesters are no longer allowed to bring tents, sleeping bags or tarps when they gather for a collective howl. Increased violence at occupations nationwide is making community leaders wary of the rag-tag revolutionaries sprouting in their fields, and police clashes with protesters are gaining prevalence.

The University of California, Berkeley, toyed with a full-scale occupation on Tuesday. Students there called for support and obliging activists flocked to campus, swelling the movement to a crowd of 1,500.

Approximately a half-mile across campus, police shot an armed man who died Wednesday. Campus officials say there is no link between the man, Christopher Travis — an undergraduate transfer student — and the protest.

On Nov. 10, 25-year-old Kayode Ola Foster was shot and killed outside Occupy Oakland, where he had been staying.

The same day, a 35-year-old veteran apparently committed suicide in a tent at Occupy Burlington.

Two occupiers have died of apparent overdoses at separate encampments, one in Salt Lake City and the other in Vancouver.

While the four deaths and UC Berkeley shooting come amidst a host of other Occupy clashes, the American demonstration toll draws nowhere near the estimated 68,401 deaths resulting from the Arab Spring.

That number, compiled by U.S. News & World Report from data supplied by countries, the United Nations and human rights groups, is comprised of deaths in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia. Libya alone accounts for 30,000 of those deaths.

The Oakland, Burlington and Salt Lake City encampments were ordered to be closed before the Wall Street protesters were evicted. Officials from at least 40 cities have begun circling the wagons, working together to determine how to best approach their similarly strange situations.

For a nation whose citizens have been largely placid since retiring the bandana and flexing fingers frozen in peace signs at the end of the ’60s, the increasing violence connected to the Occupy movement is preoccupying.

Protesters assure the media that their message is a peaceful one, but even a peaceful light in the night can draw troublesome bugs.

We don’t have a Gadhafi or Assad to overthrow. We don’t have to set ourselves on fire in order to capture our nation’s attention.

What we do have are college-educated slumber parties, bicycle-powered generators and, of course, the 1 percent.

Who is the 1 percent? With my student loan debt, it’s certainly not me. With her house and credit card payments, I don’t think it’s my mom, and it’s definitely not my grandma, a product of the Great Depression.

I don’t know the 1 percent, and since I doubt Wheaties will start featuring their faces, I may never be on a breakfast-table basis with them.

The crackdown on Occupy Wall Street — that Zeus from whose brain all other occupations sprung — suggests that maybe it’s time to pack up the tents, screw the caps back on the poster paint and head for home.

As an organizer said, adapting Victor Hugo’s words after Zuccotti Park was cleared out, “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.”

The Occupy movement has been kindled in America, and the loss of a campsite is unlikely to dampen the flames.

We may think of Valley Forge when we contemplate our independence, but it was at the Continental Congress that our newly forged independence was bestowed its strength.

Let’s get out of the field, nurse our bleeding feet and get to work creating lasting strength for the movement. UMaine occupiers are already doing so by not allowing themselves to be swept up in the spectacle. Their compatriots should follow suit.

Beth Kevit is a fourth-year journalism student. She is the news editor for The Maine Campus.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011, 12:04 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.