Occupy Your Victories: Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/occupy-your-victories-occupy-wall-streets-first-anniversary



Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O’Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn’t much of a singer. One year into the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still in progress, catalyzed by the unknown secretary of the local NAACP chapter and a preacher from Atlanta -- by, that is, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Occupy, our bouncing baby, was born with such struggle and joy a year ago, and here we are, 12 long months later.

Occupy didn’t seem remarkable on September 17, 2011, and not a lot of people were looking at it when it was mostly young people heading for Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. But its most remarkable aspect turned out to be its staying power: it didn’t declare victory or defeat and go home. It decided it was home and settled in for two catalytic months.

Tents and general assemblies and the acts, tools, and ideas of Occupy exploded across the nation and the western world from Alaska to New Zealand, and some parts of the eastern world -- Occupy Hong Kong was going strong until last week . For a while, it was easy to see that this baby was something big, but then most, though not all, of the urban encampments were busted, and the movement became something subtler. But don’t let them tell you it went away.

[pinboy3niner]

1. du rec

xchrom-style!


Happy Anniversary, Occupy!

[dougolat]

2. The "Owned Media Megaphone" ...

...wants it gone, unless they can say something bad about it:
"stop making messes" (Breitbart's "stop raping!&quot
"stop confusing the issue of our controlled / limited debate"

Provocateurs get the headlines, ideas sneak in on coat-tales.