Too Long ; Didn’t Read was Too Long; and you Didn’t Read it?: Don’t do anything stupid and #occupyportland could be the start of an American Revolution.

TL;DR: Getting arrested is a tactic and should not be used without a coordinated reason. Getting arrested without a greater purpose makes the movement look worse in the media, as the two arrested people who were tagging a police car did. You could be arrested for anything illegal you are doing, if the police decided to arrest you. If you are breaking the law within the camp, you are not working in the best interests of #occupyportland. We have better things to discuss, like institution building, outreach and organizing.

Official #occupyportland bumper sticker proposal: ‘Put An Angry Bird On It.”

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I heard that the #OccupyPortland protests could use some advice about being arrested, just in case it happens. The only reason I am telling this story is because I want you to learn from my mistakes. As you read through this piece it will become less about me and more about #occupyportland. If you’re bored, skip ahead.

The New York Police Department arrested me on February 15, 2003 in New York City during the worldwide protest against the War in Iraq. Estimates reached 36 million worldwide participants in this day of outrage. Looking back, we were right. It is eight years later, we invaded Iraq (shocker!) and in retrospect the anti-war demonstrators were right, it was a bad decision on our government’s part. I got arrested on purpose. I stepped into the street because I knew I was right, even then. My arrest was a simultaneous sit-in with two close friends (my affinity group), we went to jail together and got out separately.

The experience of getting arrested went like this: My friends and I were on a block where (apparently) a riot had broken out, after the march. I only say this because very rapidly, riot police were present. You under-estimate the capacity of the Police to deploy vast resources to tamp out protest. They appeared in an instant, blocked off the sidewalk at both ends and then told us to disperse.

If police tell you to disperse, they mean “…or we are going to arrest you.” The threat is implied in the fact that an officer is giving you an order. Demonstration over. Speech: free… enough. The law allows you to leave, unless the police make this impossible through erecting barriers around the area they’re telling you to exit. Police have employed this tactic many times, forcing marches and demonstrations to end by driving them into large cages. The recent mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge fit this description.

The police were about to perform a mass-arrest. Saying “disperse” is just a polite way for them to cover their own asses. You’re practically already under arrest if you see riot cops and hear “disperse.”

Getting arrested is not as bad as you have heard. But you will hate it if it happens to you, and you don’t want it to happen to you if it’s possible to avoid it. On the positive side I will say this: when I was in jail, I was a raucous boy. They separated a male friend and I from our female friend. He and I did chants, I did tai chi in my cell, I climbed the bars and hollered like a monkey. I sang “This Little Light Of Mine” probably a million times, until I totally lost my voice and made the guards laugh when I spoke because I sounded like a teenager. I ate a shitty cheese sandwich because the vegetarian option was a baloney and cheese sandwich with the baloney removed. A guy in one holding cell let me have the end of his cigarette. I was transferred between ten cells, buses, holdings cells and rooms and waited for a long, long time, often standing. A young kid, maybe 14, in another holding cell was probably about to receive a felony, and he was crying. It took forever to eventually see a judge, receive my sentence for disorderly conduct, and walk out the front door of the courthouse. At one point, I needed to get my lawyer’s phone number off my arm, and I stepped over my hands while wearing riot cuffs (they were loose, but I made it look to the police like I was a super-hero or something). End of the delusional fairy-tale story where jail is fun and awesome.

All that happened because I’m a crazy person, but jail is hell. I don’t want to talk about being in jail anymore. Nobody should ever aspire toward going to jail. When I saw the sky for the first time after the scant 26 hours I spent in lock-up, I cried because I realized what being “free” means. I ate at Subway in Chinatown right after my release and it was the best fucking sandwich I’d eaten in my life. Judge me all you want for it.

If the walls the Portland Marathon is building for us are not actually the walls of a cage, and the Police and Mayor of Portland really will stand with the 99%, then we can actually do something significant for ourselves, our city, state and country. The point to a nationwide #occupytogether movement is there are not enough police resources in America to arrest the 99%. The 99% truly does (based solely on income) include most police, and maybe even Portland’s Mayor. Not Bloomberg, obviously. But Adams, maybe. Someone should look up Sam Adams’ tax returns. Bloomberg is the 1% for certain. Adams so far is doing what the 99% in #occupyportland need done for this occupation to be successful. He has allied himself in so many ways with our movement.

We are right, #occupyportland, about economic injustice and corruption. #occupywallstreet is the kind of movement that needs to remain on the ground in occupation until we make a permanent change in the way our government operates. Sustaining this movement is important enough that avoiding arrests and maintaining a good public image are critical to our success. #occupyportland have successfully occupied a public park for two days, City Hall and the Police Department are behind us totally, or claiming to be, and the Portland Marathon is going to build us walls.

The police could arrest you while you are reading this. Make no mistake, the Police have the power to detain and arrest you if you are participating in #occupyportland’s encampment. The Mayor miraculously granted you immunity from a long-standing camping ban, but that doesn’t mean he can’t miraculously un-grant you that power. Especially if you are stupid enough to be smoking pot or drinking alcohol in public. There is nothing revolutionary about getting fucked up in public, especially in Portland, where it happens all the time. Many of the people expressing anti-police sentiment are doing so out of paranoia, and the problem could resolve itself if we proposed reasserting the value of security through legality, which was stated in other words as a value in the days before the protests at other general assembly meetings and which we should clearly communicate to people as they join our movement. Within the camp, security is more important than inebriation. Preventing police involvement and UNPLANNED ARRESTS is critical. People are bringing their children and their parents and their favorite cops to the #occupyportland camp. If this movement remains peaceful and law-abiding it seems increasingly unlikely that mass arrests will occur.

Assuming the police and the marathon are telling the truth.

We are nowhere near a “direct action” stage in the process. Arrests are not yet planned.

I was an Anarchist when I decided to step into the street. The Iraq war still happened. I didn’t think ahead, I made a brash decision to step into the street, and I don’t regret it. But it was stupid. I do think ahead now. I’m a reformer, of one stripe or another depending upon my day. What is important is that we talk about policy, not politics and not polarized thinking. Not “us versus them” but “all of us, for all of us, by all of us.” The 1% should simply be ignored while we reorder society and government for the 99% around them, without their say.

In a protest, getting arrested can be a tactic. It should be reserved for something meaningful.

So don’t do anything stupid, okay?

There is a tiny nation of Government by the People growing in many cities. It may one day turn into a People’s Movement, united as US Citizens (can we please stop saying “Americans” like we own the whole hemisphere?) as a fourth branch of the United States Government. That’s incredibly wishful thinking. We are nowhere near that stage in the process. Consider it something to look forward to.

Right now, the movement on the ground in all these cities is nascent. It is new. It is raw. Energies are high. Portland heard a shout-out from a friend in New York, via cell-phone bull-horn daisy-chain. It was simultaneously inspiring to hear our sister-city protesting on Wall Street, and infuriating to sit through another city’s on-the-ground report during a meeting about #occupyportland’s general assembly consensuses. Anarchists and Socialists and Democrats and Republicans are all getting in HEATED DISCUSSIONS ABOUT A NEW PROCESS. What does this prove? That the anarchists are turning into reformers. The socialists are learning how to hate the system, and teaching the anarchists to make clear demands of a process they don’t entirely trust. The Republicans and Democrats are both shocked (shocked!) that they agree on being the 99%. We all want to work with each other to build.

The anarchists in the group should decide if they are against the current government, or if they are against all organization. Institutions can only be built upon trust, understanding, and respect for the space and needs of all other people. That is why general assembly is frustrating but necessary. It prevents the collective from making a brash decision, even at the expense of forcing a slow grind that frustrates the revolutionary in each of us. If anarchists can become reformers, they allow the general assembly to reach consensus, and learn to trust the process and the rest of the crowd. We are in the struggle for economic and social justice for the 99%, and against government corruption by the 1%, together. If any anarchist is not willing to become a part of an organization of the type that #occupyportland is establishing, or that #occupywallstreet has established and maintained for a damn month, then that anarchist should stop using the resources and time of #occupywallstreet and #occupyportland general assembly. Something tells me that the anarchists might believe in economic and social justice, and in these movements see the capacity to get them done, to perhaps change the government. For an anarchist, getting some kind of control over the corrupt, unjust government would probably feel good.

In closing, here are a few ideas I think people should bring up during General Assembly (I can’t attend Saturday. I will keep coming back, cheering and occupying, and eventually speaking up if I am worried the movement has lost its way) :

Proposal #1) That in order to aid the general assembly voting process, #occupyportland begins an official registration and head-count. We need our own number of how many people are in attendance / with us, not a media estimate, and we need to know who we are working with in general assembly. Everyone should get a number, so we can keep track of everyone involved. After a day of registration, we require registration in order to vote. People should be able to register at the information booth during the booth’s open hours. If instead of saying “MIC CHECK” you just announce your number and name, and it is repeated, the crowd could instantly identify you if they had access to an electronic copy of the official document. This would facilitate trust and networking. Google Docs? OccupyPortland.Org?

2) The members of the crowd who are in opposite political parties should buddy up. Out yourself as who you usually vote for, or who you are pulling for right now if you’re a registered independent, or out yourself as a non-voter. Buddy up and work on some demands that the two of you can propose to BOTH local and national political parties (Republicans and Democrats) AT ONCE. Make a pledge that you expect your elected representative (no matter the party) to do _fill-in-the-blank_. It will bring you together, and it will start the ball rolling on creating a better government, by getting people together to think critically about elected representation.

3) Official bumper sticker for #occupyportland: “Put An Angry Bird On It.”

That’s enough for now. Go revolutionize.

If people could decide for themselves they wouldn’t need an objective press, they’d be able to hear many subjective stories and tell which one was true. Sadly, today we have some of the world’s most experienced, highest-paid liars, and some of the poorest, least-educated constituents in history. The people can not make their own decisions, lacking basic information, and don’t have any objective media to help them, just a cacophony of news personalities or entities saying “I think,” or “it sounds like” or “some people are worried that…”

Paeans to “objectivity” are almost always thinly-disguised attempts at putting facts next to opinions, or truths next to lies, and saying to the audience at home “you can decide for yourself.”

People hate to be told they’re wrong, and plenty of people are uninformed right now, thanks to the media’s refusal to stand for truth over falsehood, and the constant political attacks on education in every budget fight since God. Today’s viewers are wrong alright, and there is a market for appeasing them. Infotainment channels and websites abound to keep everyone entertained and believing whatever their misconceptions are.

The vast majority of media has no interest in objectivity. This used to be the sole function of media, and now it is the largest void, the elephant not in the room where you’d expect him. Anyone who wants objectivity nowadays had better go get it themselves.

You wonder why more mass-movements for popular change haven’t begun, in the age of instantaneously-available information. But people don’t trust the internet, they trust the TV.

It turns out that TV is only a stream of visual and auditory information. It dulls the nose and blinds the fingers to touch, it makes the tongue stop tasting important flavors. We rely so heavily on our eyes and ears via television and the internet, we have failed to realize that if we were in-studio, television personalities would be far less attractive, smelly, perhaps would not shake hands like someone you can trust.

People trust the newspapers. As though it’s impossible to print lies.

But you can trust what you see and hear, right?

Since I’ve been writing a lot lately on the topic of oversharing / information overload, I just found a decent article on the topic in my guilty pleasure magazine, GQ. This is another article hovering around the Y Combinator, which would have been exciting for me if it had existed when I was 22.

I joined and contributed to such services and platforms as Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Blippy, Swipely, DailyBooth, Goodreads, Daytum, etc., etc. I tried to tweet five times a day. I gave two sites access to my credit cards so I could share my purchases with my friends. I did my best to check in wherever I went on Foursquare. And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious—that I didn’t have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him. Every update, every tweet, every check-in, ultimately began to feel not unlike doing my expenses. The experience isn’t unusual. I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.

Worth an entire read.

It’s funny. I subscribe to Wired and I used to subscribe to GQ. Both magazines are made by Conde Nast. And they often cover the same topics (I first heard about Y Combinator in Wired). I wonder if media consolidation might be bad for journalism?

The country is gripped by shell-shock and panic. In an era where tragedies can be instantaneously broadcast to every viewer and listener, salivating dogs beg for the scraps of information they are allowed. We are addicted to spectacle, not knowledge, and our every waking moment is in hunger for the next.

Addiction is a powerful force. If the human being is addicted, it believes in its deepest animal brain that the addictive substance is required to continue living. Our reptilian brain gives us instructions: glue yourself to the television or computer or cell-phone or computer-cellular hybrid. From there, the information you will require in event of a terrorist attack, war, or natural disaster will emanate. In the mean-time, here’s some programming.

Tragic events are still far between. We can start a war in a new country instantaneously. A bomb could explode any second. The rain my never stop. But this is still not enough raw and terrifying information to fill 24 hours of programming on 900 channels. This is not enough content for the Obelisk Internet. So the tweets must run forth.

Twitter is useful, and fun, and emblematic of the serious attention deficit of our nation. We’re listening to strangers talking about their dinners, and wondering impatiently what 1,004 internet avatars are doing. “Following” and “Followers” are goals for which to strive. Being involved is a function of being glued to the medium, and all a-twitter with your public perspective and opinion, and being followers and having followers. Twitter is not the whole of the problem. It has actually completed one astounding feat: it has provided an arbitrary limit to individual thoughts and ideas. 140 characters, break. 140 characters, break. Some day when the blare of information swarming all around us is truly non-stop, we may find ourselves thankful that Twitter established this limit, so that we may perhaps hear different perspectives concurrently.

The problem is that our addiction to disaster, crash, spectacle and terror has translated poorly to our citizens. We live mostly at peace in the USA, but we remain fixated on the death and devastation that is all-too-common in our media, glued to all media waiting for the next awful report. When we aren’t watching real disasters (which doesn’t mean they’re not happening), we’re watching staged disasters (which we know are not happening as presented). The American psyche demands it, and programmers (could there be a better word?) and producers feed it to us. Brutal human combat, wasteful and dangerous racing, reality programming where contestants argue, fight, hurt and embarrass themselves, ever-more-grotesque, drugged-professional “athletics,” and graphic, violent pornography.

In the absurd theater of American discourse today, a constant stream of useless and psychically-damaging information fools us into thinking we are receiving important, life-saving information. It disguises its uselessness in the form of disastrous packaging. In the blows of the UFC we see heroism and pain, in the turns of NASCAR we see the justification for preemptive oil wars. When a contestant is eliminated from The Bachelor, we think “oh that’s devastating.” When a man falls down on America’s Funniest Home Videos, we laugh and say “ooh, that looked like it hurt.” We have our own bath-houses, websites on the internet peddling child and animal and abusive pornography. Oh, and BREAKING NEWS: OBAMA PROPOSES SOCIAL SECURITY CUTS. Back to the ramblings of your neurotic fake-friends on the RSS reader.

Our national inundation with the awful has tied us to a remnant of ourselves. A good dog sits attentively when given instructions, laps up that information and executes it diligently, and perhaps survives. The commands our media issues are more along the lines of “sit, stay, good dog,” than “fetch.” This constant spray of faux-tragic information is not necessary. We are not being saved, quite the opposite, we are being distracted and softened-up for the next real tragedy. The human brain, which can reason, must be able to see the animal brain is wrong, or surely the aggressive and persistent execution of the reptile brain will doom the entire animal.

One method used in preventing alcoholics from drinking is called “Commit, Objectify, Respond, Enjoy” or “CORE:”

Commit yourself to wanting to end your addiction.

Objectify your reptile brain. Say “it wants a drink,” or “it wants to watch Fox News all day every day.”

Respond to your animal brain with your human brain. Say “I never drink,” or “I don’t watch that sensationalist garbage because it’s toxic to my brain and convinces people to become aggressive and permissive of military aggression and blind, ideologically-driven austerity policies.”

Enjoy yourself, free of your addiction.

As Chairman of the RNC, Michael Steel is “a good face for us,” according to Orrin Hatch, Republican Senator from Utah. He made his remarks during a back-and-forth on Sunday’s Meet The Press with David Gregory. Gregory did not realize these remakrs could be interpreted in a fairly offensive way. Michael Steele is responsible for the fundraising efforts of the GOP, which are now inextricably linked to a 72-page Powerpoint Demonstration depicting RNC donors as fools and fearful anti-socialists. More on the corporate-driven nonsense on Meet The Press in another post, but I thought it might be good to point out how Hatch is saying that Steele represents “the face of the GOP,” when Steele’s job is to do much more.