Chauri Chaura

I've had to back away from Occupy Vancouver altogether.  Two reasons:

- OV has not succeeded in defining who they are such that they can define who speaks in the name of the General Assembly.  For example, there is a direct action committee which plans events without consulting the GA.  "Direct Action" could mean almost anything, including Black Bloc tactics.  I toyed with drafting proposals defining their authority, but I know they would never pass.

- OV can no longer be described as nonviolent.  Below the fold, scenes from a Nov. 7 confrontation with the police.  I have a long post coming about that.  Short version: if mass organised screaming is considered proper procedure, the group needs to take responsibility for members who lash out violently.


In 1922, Chauri Chaura was the site of a massacre of British policemen by Indian citizens during the struggle for independence.  "Gandhi felt that he had acted too hastily in encouraging people to revolt against the British Raj without sufficiently emphasizing the importance of ahimsa (non-violence) and without adequately training the people to exercise restraint in the face of attack," and therefore suspended the Non-cooperation Movement.

I'm with Gandhi -- I can't participate in a group which is purportedly engaging in non-violent resistance but which lacks the discipline and training required to remain non-violent.

Two police officers bitten at nonviolent protest

An organization committed to nonviolence should never need to deal with headlines like this: Occupy Vancouver protesters bite cops

Below the fold:

- what happened (with start-to-finish video of the confrontation)

- what nonviolence means

- what nonviolence requires
- what nonviolence requires of me

Sleep is for the weak, the weak who would like to become strong

Too busy to blog.  I have a wife, a job, a domestic mess to keep clean and an occupation to participate in.  I am a lucky man.

I've had some amazing experiences among the occupiers.  Remind me to write these blog posts:

- Ian proposes, the Elders dispose

- Where are the Christians!?

- Advice: if you have to burn out, do it among old friends who love you (or, how to get the weight of the world off your shoulders)

- Sneaky First Baptist Baptists: they actually have been as innocent as doves and as quiet as snakes

- Personal: my brother's having a baby!  (either my sister-in-law is pregnant or he got picked off by a facehugger)

- Could land swaps end the occupation one square foot at a time?  e.g. If that private landowner down the street will rent us x square feet for $1/mo (all we can afford) to store our media gear, we will agree with her to remove our media tent and de-occupy the x square feet on which it had stood.  We in Vancouver have demonstrated that we can keep our word when we say a tent is off limits in that zone.  We have a good working relationship with the VPD if someone tried to invade that space against the consensus of the general assembly.  Work for the legal team...formal contract laying out the cleanliness/noise/security/other conditions under which we would have broken faith with the landlord.  We can de-occupy inch by inch without the city even getting involved.  COMMENTERS: tell me why this is a bad idea.

Here's Springsteen sings We Shall Overcome, because we shall all be heard, we'll walk hand in hand, we shall live in peace, we shall all be free and we are not afraid, that's why.  Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday.

Occupy doesn’t mean we hold on to this dirt, it means we will hold on.  We shall overcome, someday.

Wait, I'm in charge?

I decided to go to the Art Gallery over lunch, my second time ever visiting.

I went for the 1:00 Open Forum.  It was raining heavily, and people were milling around in little groups under a few giant tarps that had been hung up to keep the rain off.  I sidled over and I talked to a few people for a while.  The start time came and went.  Time passed.  Knowing that I'd have to go to back to work eventually, I wondered when this was going to get started.  Who's in charge, here?

I think someone dropped the ball, or was called away on an emergency basis.  Maybe it was just that a lot of the regulars were kept away by the rain.  The implications of there being no formal leadership slowly sank in for me.  If someone needs to do something, that someone may be you.  In this case, me.

I asked the people I was talking with if they wanted to start and got a slightly confused maybe.  Good enough.  Then I went over to another little knot of people, asked if they were here for the meeting (yes) and said that those guys over there are ready to start.  A bit passive aggressive, but it worked.  The little knots of people slowly rolled up Katamari-style into one big circle.

I somehow I became the facilitator after a while.  This was the second meeting I'd ever attended -- I didn't even know all the hand signs.  I was scatterbrained and overapologetic.  Possibly too shy and too brash at the same time.  I hope I did the right thing stepping up.  I kept trying to give the job away.

Anyhow, there was some good conversation in spite of evrything.  No one was taking minutes.  My notes below might be the best record there is.

-----
Notes from memory on the Oct. 28 Occupy Vancouver Open Forum, as I saw it
(you may notice that I'm terrible with names - I would have included them if I could remember them)

We started with a bit of a trainwreck.  Some people were talking about the world being transformed when seen from a spiritual perspective, etc.  Another person, speaking from what I think was a new-Atheist perspective, said that he was interested in the real world.  It was a bit more pointed than we usually like, and there was a need for them to get back to common ground.  A gentleman intervened and became extremely upset about this, seizing the floor and raising his voice.  This was particularly a problem because he was our facilitator at the time.  He said he had been disrespected.  I sought consensus to take over as facilitator to mediate.  There was consensus on that without objections, and I thanked the gentleman.   mediate, I was made facilitator, and I tried to show respect for him by hearing how he had been disrespected.  He pointedly insisted on having new-atheist guy leave with him for a private conversation.  New-atheist guy was quite alarmed.   In the end, the gentleman left abruptly.*  The rest of us were a bit stunned.  Three points of ceasefire consensus:
1) Inequity is real problem in the world that doesn't go away if you stop looking
2) Coming to see the world from a new perspective can be transformative
3) Let's not talk about theism/atheism/spiritual things for the next hour

Everyone had the chance to talk about why they came and what they hope to see.  The cheerfulness was infectious.  People have wildly different and possibly irreconcilable things in mind, but they're working together. The common ground is there.  People want to get from the common ground to action.

A note about the law: there was a claim from a seemingly well-informed guy that the law about the tents is more ambiguous than it might seem.  If it's said that bylaws are being broken at the Art Gallery, we should question which bylaws specifically we're talking about.  Not something I'm clear on.

There was discussion about disruptive behaviour and how it discredits us.  There was consensus on an idea to be proposed to the General Assembly (GA). The idea was that GA should provide to the media a daily list of those activities which have consensus support from the GA.  Those and only those events are being done in our name.  By taking responsibility for the activities we agree on with full consensus, it becomes easier to say to the media that we are not responsible for disruptive behaviour that we never agreed upon or have condemned.  People who appropriate the Occupy name without building consensus at the GA are misrepresenting themselves.

[note: those of us present at this open forum may not be close enough to the relevant committee members to be in synch with their strategy on this point]

When things were winding down, we dissolved the Forum into informal discussion by consensus.


* Sir, if you should happen to read this I would very much like to speak more with you about what went wrong.
------------------
Comments would be appreciated on what went wrong/right

Notes from a General Assembly

So, I worked up the courage to wander on down to Occupy Vancouver's Art Gallery HQ for their 7pm general meeting.  It's an odd environment, but I found myself feeling more at home there than I'd thought I would.  Here's what I saw.

There's a psychological barrier to entry.  I came in at night through the east side of the site, which is packed with tents.  Some of them are from the Mountain Equipment Co-op, some seemed patched together out of blue tarp.  Walking in from that angle, at night, it felt like post-apocalyptic chaos.  Once I reached the center of the site I could see that things had been laid out in accordance with some careful planning had gone into the layout -- shelter here, services there.  Like the TARDIS, it's friendlier on the inside.

Here's a picture of the center of the site.  That concrete space between the fountain and the stairs is left open for assemblies.  The neo-classical architecture in the background is perfectly appropriate because the assemblies they're holding are neo-classical experiments in direct democracy.  This isn't news, but it was the first time I'd experienced it.

The way they run a general assembly is fascinating.  There's a facilitator who keeps track of who needs to speak next, but there's no chair and no fixed agenda.  I'd seen some of the tricks used to coordinate discussion on TV.  They looked campy and artificial there, but in person I found them to be surprisingly natural.  Hand gestures are used to indicate moment by moment whether the assembly wants to hear more from a speaker, and this focuses attention efficiently on people who ought to be heard.  The human microphone trick looked ridiculous  to me when I saw it on TV, but it works.  Suddenly that little old lady at the back of the crowd can be heard across the square.  Speaking in unison is strangely powerful.  Without central control you'd expect the meeting to turn into babbling chaos (and sometimes it did) but the assembly as a whole proved able to snap itself back into attentive silence on a turn of a dime.  People just don't get this engaged at meetings conducted according to Robert's rules of order.  I was sorry that I had to leave as early as I did.

The thrilling subject of this evening's meeting was...a report from the finance committee.  This drew rapt attention from a large crowd.  They've received a few thousand dollars in donations (to be spent on their medical tent, porta-potties, etc.).  Discussion covered the legal difficulties around opening an account for an informal group, who would have signing authority, what accounting procedures should be used and how this information should be publicly reported.  Some prominent members of the finance committee (open to anyone who wants to join) held the floor for most of the discussion, not as leaders but as voices worth listening to.  The assembly seems to be fairly good at focusing attention on people who know what they're talking about (in this case, people with enough expertise as bankers to know the details of how the system works).  They were bombarded with demands for accountability.  One suggestion was that four signatures should be required for every check!  The man currently responsible for the bookkeeping took this in stride.  Accountability begins at home.

At one point a clearly disturbed man wandered through the center of the assembly holding a sign that read "your voices sound hollow to me."  That did not disrupt the meeting.  After a few minutes a person led him aside to talk to him.  It turned out that his immediate concern was that he was looking for was a sign language interpreter.  This is a community that is very, very good at listening to marginalized people.


I can see some serious challenges that need to be overcome.

First, it's being held together by a few people who are clearly in danger of burnout.  Generating consensus and mutual respect takes attentive listening, creativity, raw determination and a good sense of humour.  People who can do that are rare, and some of them are apparently working onsite 20 hours/day.  The woman in the gray coat who so joyfully facilitated the assembly (called attention to the rules of order) was doing hero's work but it was clearly exhausting.  They need relief, but where will it come from?
 
Second, there were some problems keeping people on the same page in the financial debate.  Questions were sometimes repeated.  I get the sense that complex topics need a consensus ratchet, some visual cue that sub-topic A has been resolved so that we can move on to sub-topic B.  One woman was experimenting with taking point form minutes on sign.  That might work.

Third, a woman in a gray knit cap who spoke with some authority pointed out that there is tension building due to disruptive behaviour.  Some people have gone off on their own to disrupt municipal debates or block traffic.  That discredits the everyone else, but what can the rest of us do to prevent this?

Fourth, the woman in the gray knit cap warned that the Art Gallery protest might come to be self-serving.  The goal cannot be to benefit the people encamped there -- it's to get the rest of society involved.  I think she's right in thinking that this will grow or die.