November 23, 2011
The Great Statewide Occupation
by Stephen Marshall
While we struggle with the desire to occupy and demonstrate against
greed and privilege in Burlington, Brattleboro, Bennington and
Montpelier, we have in Vermont a huge base of folks who believe in the
cause but are not on the ground. To show our power, to celebrate our
determination, and demonstrate democracy in action, I propose a Great
Statewide Occupation and General Assembly for all Vermonters who believe
in the cause. I propose that we occupy the Statehouse, and occupy the
well of the house, and share our visions for a just and sustainable world.
To prepare for this one-day occupation, I propose that every supporter
and every working group and every assembly write a simple statement on
the subject "What is Just, What is Sustainable, and What Our Movement
Can Do.". I propose that these statements be gathered on the occasion of
our occupation, and mounted into a book, to be presented to our elected
officials, and published for everyone to read.
If this vision resounds for you, please join the group
Occupy_VT_Community_Development, at
http://groups.google.com/group/occupy_vt_com_dev .
The description of this group is "Visioning our future and our success,
as a community and a movement, in the full diversity of the 99%"
The goal is to develop the largest possible community of solidarity
around the fundamental concerns of the occupy movement. The strategy is
to facilitate a visioning process to collect and affirm the widest
possible spectrum of ideas and feelings about what the movement might
do, and reflect them back to ourselves and the political community. A
proposed project is to convene a Statewide Occupation of the Statehouse.
We have identified with the occupation movement because we, like the
occupiers of Wall Street, are angry. We are angry because we see the
quality of our lives wane and the health of the Earth decline as a few
others get more wealthy, for no reason better than that they already
have money. We are angry because they pursue wealth, profit, privilege
and power, regardless of the impact these pursuits might have on the
lives of the not wealthy, the not privileged, the not connected. We are
angry because the economy is not designed to support livelihood, it is
designed to facilitate the flow of wealth from the poor to the rich. We
are angry because the wealth we produce with our labor is taken from us,
to support corporations that only care about profits, to support empire
building which does nothing for the vitality of our economy or the
prosperity of our communities or the health of our Earth.
We, the angry, are the 99.9% of Americans who struggle to make ends
meet, while the 0.1% of Americans who control the wealth, who need the
wealth least, get more wealthy. We come together now to end the
accumulation of privilege and to end the distortion of our democracy
which is the natural effect of privilege.
But how will we do this? As a movement dedicated to the absolute
equality of every citizen, and to the systematic distribution of power
within our political structures, we might recognize that equality is
inherent in socially networked community, and that community formation
is our best strategy to create and maintain equality within our movement
and society. Therefore, just to live the change we wish to see, we must
make extra-ordinary efforts to inform ourselves of what each other
thinks and feels, to connect socially, and build community.
To this end, this working group is created as a vehicle to create the
visioning process, and to organize events for visioning our future and
to vision the world we wish to see.
Sign on to the Google Group Occupy_VT_Community_Development, at
http://groups.google.com/group/occupy_vt_com_dev , and we'll begin a
discussion "What are our first steps?".
--
Stephen Marshall
11 Hungerford Terrace
Burlington Vermont 05401
Dispolemic.Blogspot.Com
802-922-1446
