Occupy LA

Ok, so I just got back from Occupy Los Angeles and I'm not amused.

First, while there is a much greater organization on the personal level, it creates problems. There are fights. Mostly verbal- but I saw one fistfight. There is petty thievery, but mostly within a single group of people. There is a lot of bigotry- one tent I found warned of the "liberal bigotry" that was rampant at that location, and I can certainly attest to it.

Second, here are a lot of people there who's only aim is to get wasted and party. In the late afternoon there was a guy who represented part of the medical marijuana movement. There were huge weed banners, they gave out free samples of marijuana and most of the conversation I heard were people talking about scoring or how high they were. The crowd present during that part of the event (roughly half of the Occupied space) seemed to be there only to party. It was disheartening, to say the least.

I went to the General Assembly and it honestly looked like the student body council was running the show with a few older activists. There was very little active participation and the people's mic (having the crowd repeat the message to amplify the sound) didn't seem to be used for it's intention. It seemed like an indoctrination process. Everybody who wanted to hear was close enough to hear, and it seemed like the speakers were using it for their own enjoyment and as a flimsy way to get the audience to participate.

I spoke with some of the core group of the organizers (some of the people I felt were in the hub of the know) and they all had major hang-ups. There were four people talking together and myself, mostly listening or calling bullshit. One guy was obsessed with technology, always bringing up the fact that the government has something like "zero energy" which he knew ABSOLUTELY nothing about. Every single thing he brought up, I asked for details about. Nothing. Another guy kept bringing up Hamilton. Another kept trying to come up for a slogan for the corporate-government marriage. While I think each had strong and important points (some more than others), few could venture outside their area of specialization or general opinion.

One of them actually said this (I'm paraphrasing). "you know Pangaea? Yeah, well all the continents fit together! The dinosaurs died out because they liked to walk around and then the world's single land mass cracked." he goes on to explain, incredibly poorly, how the earth is expanding, how the grand canyon is a stretch mark and how the expansion of the earth creates water. Nevermind the simple fact that huge amounts of condensation in the early forming of the planet caused torrential flooding. There was too much bogus science to actually disprove piece by piece so I went to the heart of it. "What's the science behind the earth expanding? Why does it do that?"

"You know, it's sort of like why the planets spin in orbit. It's just something that happens!"

... and you're running this event? EXCUSE ME?! Then he went on how zero energy machines pull energy out of the environment. "What kind of energy does this thing pull? Like, static or heat or... what?"

"You can't think of it like that. You have to think about it like Einstein said- that everything is made of energy. You have to think about it like that." (I kid you not)

Ok, ok, okay, okie dokie. You burn something, Combustion turns it into heat and fire and light and smoke and ash- how does this machine take energy from the environment?

Oh, I don't know the science. There are like, really smart physicists that understand that. They make it work.

FACEPALM. All in all, I don't see humanity working out. Sorry. Nice try. I'm still going to provide updates. I'm still going to try to go once a week. I'm not at ALL enthused about what's happening. Interestingly enough, my original assessment holds true. We need more people of a more diverse ideological background. I'll add this, that we must become incredibly more proactive about our engagement with this thing or else it will just be a front lawn keger in every city hall. If that's the case, I really do hope the cops come and hose them off the grass.

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If I spend more than six hours there, I'm going to start hulk-smashing fools like Godzilla with a bone to pick.

Another major point I wanted to make is that we had some really excellent speakers! Like, incredible people! Unfortunately the majority of the people who showed up for the event were only there for the speech- they were not the people staying in the tents (most of them were not). Speakers include distinguished people as the following:

Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and former US Labor Secretary
William Black, professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri
Joel Rogers, professor of Law, Political Science, Public Affairs and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin
Michael Hudson - (via livestream) President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends
Robert Scheer, Executive Editor, Truthdig.org
George Lakoff - (via livestream) - Professor of cognitive linguistics at UC Berkeley
Ellen Brown, Attorney and President of the Public Banking Institute