A suggestion for OWS Act II - 'Occupy Our Country"

[GliderGuider]

This idea springs from a thread here.

Start a movement of OWS bus caravans modeled on the civil rights era Freedom Riders.

The caravans would move very slowly through towns and cities across the country like traveling OWS camps. Advance teams could prep the media and scope out local Occupy issues in upcoming stops. Use social media to advertise the action. In each town the caravan could help set up an Occupy camp and use it as a place to hold teach-ins on global, national and local topics. Give the locals a forum to lead media-accessible workshops on their own issues. Conduct special direct action events as local opportunities present themselves (occupy a local CEO's driveway?). Seed the nucleus of a local Occupy presence if one doesn't already exist. Encourage locals to join into the caravan. Move on to the next town.

It's a facilitated local grass-roots consciousness-raising movement. It could run year-around, and would be a great way to keep the movement active and visible during the winter. It bypasses the MSM and goes straight to the 99% where they live.

Occupy Our Country

What are your thoughts and ideas?

[meow2u3]

1. That sounds like an excellent idea

Occupy Wall Street organized a march from New York to DC, picking up people along the way and ending up with more people than they began with. If Occupy LA tries that tactic, Lord knows how many more will join the original marchers, since it'll be a coast-to-coast march.

Start out with a few thousand marchers and you just might end up with millions, even tens of millions, of angry American citizens fed up with being ripped off occupying Congress in numbers far too big to ignore.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. Not really much like the Freedom Riders, but interesting.

"The Freedom Riders set out to challenge this status quo by riding various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement and called national attention to the violent disregard for the law that was used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Riders were arrested for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses."

These were not caravans of vehicles, they were organized individuals engaged in non-violent civil disobedience using public transportation as a focus of their activities due to the most peculiar rules regarding where one had to sit based on where one was geographically and who one was racially.

The financial and logistical issues seem prohibitive to me. The power of Occupy Where You Are is and was that it provided a permanent local location for organized protest. You didn't have to go to DC, you just had to go Down Town. Instead you would have people go on a permanent pilgrimage - how do they get gas money?

In '68 the Poor People's Campaign, started by King before the oligarchy killed him, did something like what you are imagining. It was not ineffective as an organizing tool, although subsequent events, starting with its end point at the '68 convention in Chicago overshadowed it.

[GliderGuider]

3. Fair enough. Here are a few counter-arguments.

There are a lot of logistically astute people out there. Gas and food money can be found.

Think of the caravans as mycelium, spreading out through the country - a small number of people in each one can seed a large number of new local camps in the places they visit. As far as the locals are concerned, they are Occupying Where They Live. Nobody needs to go anywhere else unless they feel called.

The "pilgrimages" don't need to be permanent. They will probably spring up and die out organically - that's a quality of the movement right now, after all.

[FirstLight]

4. yeah!

someone here suggested a 'roadtrip to DC' in the spring, type thing. much like the walk from NY to DC. and I would be SO down with getting an RV and taking to the road...! and yes, i think a collective roadtrip could be in order :)

[applegrove]

5. I do believe Occupy should start a forum where you can vote up inequalities

people write about... kinda like a twitter. Without the ability to vote down, or discuss issues to minimize sockpuppets and trolls. That way highlighted inequality issues would bubble up from below and everyone would be involved in deciding which are the most urgent issues. IMHO.