Nomad New York

99%Spring followup

April 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Today I had my first conversation with a person who attended a 99%Spring training and loved it. His was on the Lower East Side in the daytime, mine on the upper West Side in the evening. I’m guessing that his training was a full day training.

After the training, they all got on buses to go to an “undisclosed location”. As it turned out, they ended up protesting at a couple of banks. I asked him if he had had any actual training. He said that he had, not allot but “The best part of the program were the people”. I concur. “Did anybody mention that this was the first part of six sessions” I asked? He looked at me blankly.

Most of what I’ve heard back, prior to today, confirms my own experience but I am glad that some people are having good experiences at 99%Spring training, perhaps it depends on the location and the trainers.

I have questions. I have lots of questions. If they could afford two busses on the Lower East Side to cart attendees off to a protest, why couldn’t my training afford decent audio-video? If other groups were told that they were training for May Day, why weren’t we?

I urge you to read this post by another person who attended my training and confirms that this was a total cluster-fuck. He tells us:

The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.

I missed that. I was preoccupied when I came in the door.

A large man with long wavy hair combed back started the presentation with a stirring call for…the meeting to be off the record. He didn’t want any stories that would violate anyone’s privacy, and if there were any lurking journalists, they weren’t allowed to use any names and they must see him afterwards for further instruction on the ground rules. This struck an even more dysphoric note than the Obama buttons.

I missed that. At that point in time, I had no idea that I was going to be writing about my experience. All I can think is “Who the fuck do you think that you are?”

Next some guy whose name I didn’t catch gave an astonishingly simple-minded lecture on the history of American radicalism since the populists. “This might be okay for Iowa, but not the Upper West Side,” said a woman near me.

I am going to repeat again that We did not get any actual training. I can not stress that enough!! We were told that this was the first of six sessions This is really important and significant. I have yet to find where this is relayed to attendees on their 99%Spring web site. If true, it would make the training impossible to complete prior to May Day.

And so it went from 6:30 to 9:30 last Tuesday night. Over half the crowd left early. Most of those who stayed appeared to be angry and mystified that they had received no training whatever in nonviolent direct action.

At least not at this training of 200 radical, mostly older folks, on the Upper West Side who were ready go out the door and put their non-violent training to use.

I suggest that anyone interested in checking out 99%Spring training to go ahead and do it. You may have a good experience, you may not. I’m interested to hear and read about your experiences. Clearly, the training results will depend on who is offering them.

My discussion with 99%Spring Guy

April 12th, 2012 § 1 Comment

Before I get to this on-line discussion, Several of us are currently working on Non-violence and Direct Action training that will be coming up in the near future. Please stay tuned and please follow #ows and @occupytownsq on twitter.

99%Spring Guy, that link is from someone who, in her own account, attended the first half-hour of a half-day training and then left – by her own admission, she says there were

six sessions

, and she left after the first. In other words, someone with zero legitimacy to say what actually was in the training.

Given that the training materials are public on the 99% Spring website, the claim there’s no direct action training just isn’t gonna wash.

99%Spring Guy, show me where in any of the 99 Spring website (which includes all their training materials) there’s anything about voting Democratic. Given this is a coalition that includes Green-affiliated partners (Code Pink, Institute for Policy Studies, SmartMeme, etc. etc.) and is legally housed in the non-electoral arm of MoveOn, with legal consequences for entering electoral politics (check out the sign-up page), you’re not going to find it.

Me: ‎@99Spring % Guy, Where does it say that the person only attended the first half-hour of a half-day training? Just curious. You said that this is in her own account. Where is it? Also, does it actually say anywhere obvious in the training material that the training is for 6 sessions?

You said that she said “in her own account” that she only attended “the first half-hour” of a half day training. Prove it. Secondly, the materials do not promise direct action training. The web site says: ” to train ourselves in non-violent action”. See? I sure hope that the training this weekend goes allot better.

99%Spring Guy (Quotes me)

“It turns out that this was the first of what would be six programs (surprise!) and that our task was to come up with some actions…I was chatting in the back of the room with her, getting her number when the trainers/organizers began to get restless. There were several of us networking. One woman, clearly not ever any kind of occupier, ordered us to go to our seats. When we ignored her, she asked us more politely to take it outside. I decided to leave.”

In your account, you went to the first of six components, then refused to sit down to train with the rest of the individuals. That’s fine – people shouldn’t have to finish something if they don’t want to. But it’s disingenuous to attend such a small part of an extended training and then claim to speak authoritatively about what was and wasn’t included, or that people wanted to be trained and they weren’t. Every other account of the trainings I’ve read online has been pretty similar in terms of content, regardless of how someone feels about the quality of the trainings – the beginning part focused on history of direct action as a tactic, then there were exercises, then they went through contingency plans for actual direct actions[Ed Note: Not in our "training"]. (If someone doesn’t have the patience for an opening set of exercises, and wants to get into the training immediately, that’s also fine – but they should say that[Ed Note: If he had read what I actually wrote, he would see that this is exactly what we did], instead of saying “I wanted to be trained and wasn’t.”)

If someone went to *any* direct action training, went to such a small portion and left, and then gave a similar account, whether it be at Occupy, at Ruckus Society (one of the sponsoring groups that helped put together the training according to the Waging Nonviolence account), or anywhere, it’d be deeply disingenuous – but your piece didn’t only speak to the individual training, but a training that includes, according to the website, 900+ individual trainings. I’d find it rather offensive for someone to go to a fraction of a single Occupy meeting at a single occupation, and then claim they could speak authoritatively for all of Occupy – I assume you’d feel similarly.

As for distracting from May Day and other Occupy planned actions [Ed Note: Another thing that I never said], it takes a moment to check the May 1st entries on http://actions.the99spring.com/actions/events/upcoming. This should be an enormous opportunity for Occupy – a set of direct action trainings ending in mid-April [Ed Note: It is now April 12th. How is this possible?] [Ed Note: Again reference to a 6 series training], with thousands of people who haven’t been involved in it before (much less at Occupy), who will be looking for a place to go next after their experience- even if you personally don’t care for the trainings, or find that they’re too basic, or whatever, that’s an incredible opportunity to reach out to people and involve them. The fact that some would rather preemptively debunk than actively take part and engage those folks is extremely discouraging.

Me: Actually I stayed for almost of the “training”. I left when they were wrapping up. They changed the schedule and showed the film before the breakout. I knew other people who were there. There was still no training.

There was no training.

You misread what I wrote because your interpretation fits in with your defense.

I agree completely that this SHOULD have been an enormous opportunity, but it wasn’t.

Why not read what I actually wrote and take steps to improve the program instead of going around the internet and lying about what I actually said and did?

Again, where does it say on the web site that this is a 6 session training?

Dude, I’m sure that it says it somewhere but I can’t find it and if I can’t find it, perhaps you are not being clear on what this “training” entails.

And I am pointing this out to you not to accuse you of obfuscating the truth but to point out your lack of clarity here.

And lastly, at no point have I ever presumed to speak for all of Occupy. I speak for myself alone. The fact that others had similar experiences only reinforces my opinion. And, FYI – I defended your program up & down before attending.

99%Spring is a bust at co-opting Occupy Wall Street

April 10th, 2012 § 20 Comments

(Edited 4/11 for clarity – Edits are bracketed).
[My discussion with a 99%Spring guy]

Everyone knows that I’m a big fan of Van Jones, and it’s not just because he’s hot. That’s not why I chose to participate in 99% Spring, however.

I’m not one of those people who goes around worrying allot about co-option. I assume that if we all have the same goals, it doesn’t matter much. [I was looking forward to non-violent training. I like the idea that there might be a more structured option that allows individuals to engage with the 99% movement. I went into this with an open mind.] I didn’t think that 99%Spring was out to co-opt Occupy Wall Street.

I was wrong.

The web site doesn’t tell you much about what 99%Spring is. The web site promises:

This Spring We Rise!
April 9-15 we will gather across America, 100,000 strong, in homes, places of worship, campuses and the streets to train ourselves in non-violent action and join together in the work of reclaiming our country. History is calling; it’s time to step up.

So here we were. We were shown a movie of historical progressive movements on a lopsided screen with crappy sound. This happens. Not a big deal. We were educated about Harriet Tubman and the textile mills in Lawrance. The songs that my chorus sings ran through my head as I watched. People began to get restless and leave. It was mostly an older crowd. We were already activists. We already know this stuff. The organizers cut the movie short and we (200 of us) broke out into 4 separate groups.

We all introduced ourselves. Each participant was given 5 minutes to make their 30 second introductions. There were some amazing people in the room. We were then asked to come up with some ideas about direct actions we could take.

“I thought that we were here for training”, somebody said. The leader seemed a bit uncomfortable. It turns out that this was the first of what would be six programs (surprise!) and that our task was to come up with some actions. He read through a list of three ideas that the organizers had come up with. One of them was a “move your money day“, when large numbers of people would go into banks to move their money. “That’s already been done”, someone else said. The second and third idea I have forgotten. The leader made it clear that this program has nothing to do with Occupy. We were not there to train for May Day. This further confused people. We weren’t sure what we were doing there.

Everything felt wrong.

Participants did come up with a handful of ideas. One dealt with fracking and another with the bonuses that are being handed out by large corporations who don’t pay taxes. One older woman was very involved with the occupiers living in the church uptown and was interested in re-housing them. She also brought up the clinic being built by Mt. Sinai and the fact that there was no free clinic associated with it. People were largely unenthusiastic. At the end of this session as we were herded back into the main room, this same woman said to me, “I thought that we were here to be trained in Non-violence for May Day. I thought that we were going to stand between the police and the protesters.” I thought that she was really cool.

I was chatting in the back of the room with her, getting her number when the trainers/organizers began to get restless. There were several of us networking. One woman, clearly not ever any kind of occupier, ordered us to go to our seats. When we ignored her, she asked us more politely to take it outside. I decided to leave.

It was largely an older crowd. Many had been to Zucotti but hadn’t found a way to get involved. If you visited Zucotti after the change, it was a difficult place to fit into. In the early days of Zucotti, I knew allot of the people in the park. It was easy to pop in and do something to help out. They were the kindest, most loving people you could have met. It was hard to visit Occupy Wall Street and not fall in love with the place. A good chunk of them disappeared some time around the first threatened eviction in October and when the tents went up. When the tents went up, the park became insular and intimidating. The “real occupiers” frequently showed contempt for people who didn’t sleep in the park. There used to be a guy sitting at the “information” desk on Broadway who was so rude and contemptuous that I saw people who came to visit turn away (I haven’t seen him since the eviction).

Yes. 99%Spring really is an attempt to co-opt Occupy Wall Street. There is a huge hunger right now by people who want to get involved but do not know how.

Instead of enhancing an existing movement with experienced activists who very badly want to be involved, 99%Spring is attempting, very badly, to replace that niche and attempting to formalize something that is organic.

This article in Gawker had it right here:

And while it’s certainly possible that the 99 Percent Spring will give a structure and strength that only aids Occupy, it’s just as likely that they’ll drown it out and sanitize it, “mainstreaming” progressive populist outrage by beating it down….

And had it wrong here:

and dragging it back to the spineless middle

And MoveOn will be there, too. Only this time they’ll have 100,000 volunteers ready and able to get out the vote in 2012, helping Occupy to astroturf for the same slate of corporate disappointments that sent people screaming into the streets in the first place.

No, they wont. Most of the people present tonight will not be back. There is none of the excitement and the engagement that exists in the Occupy Movement. There is nothing but a lame attempt to steal it. It’s like choosing stale bread over bread that’s fresh out of the oven.

We were not prepared to come up with ideas for direct action. That’s not what we were there for. We came for training. It’s time for the Occupy Affiliations, the community neighborhood Occupations to get cracking. I’m going to tell you what the people at this 99%Spring training want: “Give us our non violence training and we will be there on May Day standing between you and the Police”.

[Additional note: I was one of the people who initially signed up to be a trainer. I missed the opportunity due to other obligations. The trainers are all volunteers and I'm sure that they mean well. Our trainer was a sweetheart and, although I do take exception to being ordered to do anything, it is not my intention to slam them.]

Nuggets from MoveOn’s 99%Spring documents
Occupy Wall Street Activists Respond to the 99 Percent Spring

Dad gets turned down by the U.S. Army

April 8th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Dear Sir,

Most of your charges against me I did not deny. As a matter of fact, I supplied the information myself. Some of your charges I have to deny as being untrue or a gross elaboration of the truth.

In you first charge, you stated that I was a member of the Junior Youth League in San Francisco in 1955-1956. The fact is that I did not come to San Francisco until September of 1956.

I never denied association or connection with leftist groups. This I admitted when I signed form 98 which I filled out to the best of my ability at the time. I am not in the habit of assuming that I am disloyal to the United States government. When form 98 was presented to me I did not know what to do, knowing I had been involved with groups which were on the Attorney General’s List. My only recourse was to sign with reservation. I had no preceding knowledge of the forms or the procedure. My aim, in signing the forms the way I did, was to proclaim my loyalty and also to reveal my association with leftist groups.

I protest being classified as a security risk. I protest it on the grounds that the charges against me, some admittedly true, do not make me less loyal.

You would not declare a man a criminal because he was a juvenile delinquent when he was a youth. You judge him as a mature person. Perhaps I am not yet a mature person, and perhaps I will never think just as others would have me think but I wish you to take under consideration that most of the things with which you charge me occurred when I was a teenager. To be branded for the actions of ones youth is a little unfair.

You have not given me the benefit of the doubt. You have assumed that I am guilty.

I never joined the Writer’s workshop. I did go to meetings and if this makes me a member than I would have to admit that I was a member.

I was on the Youth Recorder and wrote all of the three articles, including one story. In neither one of these articles is there anything more radical than what you could read in the daily Chronicle. Read them. I wrote under the name of Aaron Harris.

I am not sorry for my past nor do I apologize for it. It is there. In judging my case, please judge it on the present. Perhaps you will find that I am no more loyal than many “pure” Americans.

Respectfully,

Delmos Jehu Jones

Communist target: youth. Communist infiltration and agitation tactics. A report

Eleventh Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, California Legislature

Habitual Deficiency

March 10th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I had a dream that I was helping a former lover move out of an extremely cluttered apartment. I had the sense that it was a huge, messy job. Flashing forward, I found myself at the bottom a very steep hill. I knew that I had to be somewhere important and that I was going to have to climb that hill in order to get there. Flashing forward again, I found myself at a big warm happy party where I was surrounded by loving family and friends. I sat down next to another old lover, one who died a little more than 10 years ago. He took my hand and smiled at me. End dream. I woke up crying.

Now that his ghost is back, I think of him often. Today, I was on the subway listening to “Clocks” by Coldplay on my Ipod and I found myself crying again. When you think of someone who lost their best friend, that’s probably me. We had a complicated relationship that lasted on & off for 20 years but I don’t think that there was ever any doubt that we loved each other and that we accepted each other completely for who we were. There were times that I would think of him, and he would show up. We would run into each other in the street or in a bar. We could go for a few years without seeing each other, but when we did, we would pick up right where we had left off.

Then I lost contact with him. I did not know that he was dying. He never told anyone. I never said goodbye to him.

Because of the place where he showed up in my dream, I know that he’s still there for me.

I try not to take love for granted and I will never apologize for loving anyone.

Coldplay Clocks Lyrics:

The lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have brought me down upon my knees
Oh I beg, I beg and plead, singing

Come out of the things unsaid
Shoot an apple off my head and a
Trouble that can’t be named
A tiger’s waiting to be tamed, singing

You are, you are

Confusion that never stops
The closing walls and the ticking clocks gonna
Come back and take you home
I could not stop, that you now know, singing

Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities am I
A part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease, singing

You are, you are

And nothing else compares

“It’s Not Fair”!

February 11th, 2012 § 1 Comment

I have a stark memory from my childhood. Someone had gone into the bathroom and emptied out the laundry hamper, leaving the laundry all over the floor. My father decided that I had done it and insisted that I put all of the laundry back into the hamper. Threatened by a spanking and overwhelmed by the unfairness of it, put the laundry back into the hamper and threw a huge temper tantrum while I was doing it. At the age of 7, it was the worst thing that anyone had ever done to me.

That moment of unfairness was followed by many more, many of which were handed out by my father. I loved my father dearly but he was never one to be wrong or to apologize. I watched him do it to other people, he accused my brother of stealing valuable coins from his coin collection when the culprit was more likely one of his friends. Their relationship suffered after that for years. He accused a girlfriend of cheating on him and ended the relationship abruptly when it was apparent to anyone how much she loved him.

My life-time tolerance for unfairness has been at level zero and yet I consistently invite people into my life who are fundamentally unfair, rigid and unapologetic about it. Unfair situations can send me into a tailspin. Memories of unfair moments can lie quiescent for a while only to rear their heads at 4:00 in the morning sending me into a minor rage.

My moments of victory involve those times that I have been able to overcome unfairness. There were moments when my children were young that I came out roaring like a lion and was able to correct the situation. There were times that some company or another ripped me off and I was able to find justice. Those situations were, for me, relatively impersonal and very blatantly unfair. It has been and remains the personal moments of unfairness that I have not been able to overcome until I let them go. The more that I hold onto unfairness and my resentment over unfairness, the less likely they are to resolve themselves.

As a Buddhist, I know this. My attachment to being vindicated is very strong. I believe that I have spent my entire lifetime being obsessed with fairness. As an activist, this is a valuable trait, fighting for fairness is the fundamental foundation of activism. There are valid points of unfairness. It’s not fair when your children have been unfairly treated. It’s not fair when a friend has been unfairly imprisoned for a crime that he did not do. It’s not fair when peaceful protesters have been attacked, beaten and imprisoned by the police.

I have frequently believed that I was inviting people into my life who are unfair and this theme has been discussed constantly in one way or another in my blog. I’ve come to realize that most people have moments of unfair judgement. When those unfair judgments become too frequent and too hurtful, it’s a common cause of the ending of friendships for me. This past year was particularly brutal because it involved two people that I did not really want to let go of. Psychologically they probably both evoked the Dad that would never consider the fact that I was not the one who threw all of the laundry onto the bathroom floor. Psychologically I’m still the kid throwing the temper tantrum that arose out of the complete lack of power that the accusation caused me and by my equally complete inability to defend myself against his certainty.

At another point in time, while I was dealing with unfair accusations that bordered on insanity I used to fantasize that I was on one of those talk shows confronting my accuser, that she would make her crazy accusations and I would calmly refute them. The audience would boo her because my innocence was obvious and her accusations were clearly insane and I would emerge victorious. Like the past year, it was an extremely difficult and painful time for me and took up enormous amounts of energy. Her need to constantly tell me what I had done, her attachment to convincing me that I was a bad person, was equally matched by my attachment to convincing her that “I didn’t do that” and “That’s not what I meant”.

I eventually gave up. I never convinced her that I was not evil. I’ve realized recently that when I come into contact with someone profoundly unfair and judgmental and give into the need to pound them with my innocence and my defense that I’m actually no better than she was.

As a Buddhist, I don’t have to pretend to be perfect and la la la at peace with myself and the world. The goal is not perfection, but awareness. One of my teachers the other night said something that struck me. He said that making 100 mistakes is progressive. Making the same mistake 100 times is regressive. The hardest lesson that I’m learning is how to say “That’s not fair” and to let the unfair go when there is nothing that I can do about it.