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Inside #OWS... Also From: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/occupy-wall-street-2011-12/ The attempts by the institutional left to make common cause with OWS have raised hopes in some but hackles in many more. Some of the annoyance can be traced to the condescension of the left’s old hands. “There was a gentleman who gave this lecture the other day and said, ‘I’ve been doing this for 35 years,’ blah blah blah,” recalls Sandy Nurse, a 27-year-old New School graduate and former U.N. contractor who has been instrumental to planning OWS’s major actions. “I said, ‘If you’ve been doing this for 35 years and you’re still at square one, you need to fucking think about how you’re organizing.’ ”<And...> One early evening in November, Sandy Nurse and I were sitting on the floor of an OWS storage space, surrounded by backpacks, sleeping bags, piles of rain ponchos, and enough toilet paper, toothpaste, Kleenex, and Q-tips to stock a Wal-Mart. Nurse is a striking half-Panamian, half-Irish-American who grew up as a military brat, worked on activist causes such as human trafficking, and now is a self-described “ballbuster” logistician for OWS. She was telling me about the time when Charlie Rangel showed up while she was speaking before a march and wanted to address the crowd. “I turned around and said, ‘You can’t speak here, you’re too divisive a figure, you definitely don’t represent what this is about, so you probably need to leave,’ ” she recalled.
Given Nurse’s attitude, it’s not surprising that when Jesse Jackson arrived two weeks later, she was no more welcoming. This was at a smaller meeting in the offices of the Communications Workers of America at 80 Pine. On hand were about a dozen of the prime movers—Berger, Marom, and Premo among them—and some union representatives. No one was expecting Jackson, he came unannounced, and Nurse’s first thought was, Why should we interrupt this meeting for this person? But Jackson played humble, taking the seat next to Nurse, asking if he was welcome, waiting quietly for his turn to speak. Then, holding Nurse’s hand, he proceeded to unfurl a soliloquy in which he described the occupiers as inheritors of the mantle of the civil-rights movement. He talked about Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, one of the last protests that MLK planned before his death. About Resurrection City, the shantytown on the National Mall that several thousand people populated in May and June of 1968. About how one advantage to having no identifiable leader is that “there’s nobody to assassinate.”
Jackson looked at Berger and asked, “What does Lyndon Johnson mean to you?” Berger shrugged. “The Vietnam War?” Jackson folded his hands across his belly and declaimed, “Civil Rights Act of 1964—LBJ. The Voting Rights Act of 1965—LBJ. Medicare—LBJ. Medicaid—LBJ. Child Nutrition Act—LBJ. Jobs Corps—LBJ.” A few of the OWSers greeted Jackson’s words with skepticism, but most found them powerful, inspirational. “The connection with historical movements is what gives this so much moral credibility,” says Berger. “For someone like him to tell us ‘You have a history, tap into that history’—literally, I have goose bumps.” I like her... A LOT!!! :evilgrin: |
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