A Pep Talk for the Occupy Movement

The #Occupy Movement is a platform for democratic engagement. It's aims to reboot our politics and upgrade to a better operating system...a political system that: (a) includes everyone and (b) acknowledges the elephants in our era's room: the corruption of our government by private interests and the threat to our national community by rising economic inequality. People have criticized the Occupy Movement for not having any specific demands...but, again, the movement is just a platform, an operating system for we, the people to utilize in whichever way we want...to criticize the Occupy movement for not having specific demands is like criticizing the Founding Fathers for not attaching a budget to the Constitution or criticizing Wikipedia's founders for not writing every article themselves. Occupy's a platform...an operating system for us to use and build upon!

However, we Occupiers need to acknowledge that operating systems get stale if they do not have any awesome apps on them. We love 'the internet' for its websites; we love our iPhones for Angry Birds; and we love our Constitution for the programs and laws it has allowed us to pass and implement. If an operating system does not have any compelling apps, it withers. True, Occupy's "raise awareness that there's a problem" app was awesome and made the nation fall in love with Occupy. The "tent city" apps were pretty interesting...until they got deleted. And the "marches" and "direct action" apps occasionally inspire.

But, looking at the movement now, we're in trouble if we don't produce some other 'killer apps' -- features of the movement that will make people excited again...excited for a movement about making our country better.

With the eviction of the tent cities across the country, we have a choice: we can keep doing only more of the same: occupations, marches, and civil disobedience.

Or... we can get brainstorming, innovating, and implementing an orchard of actions:
Let's start up some public interest research and advocacy groups on campuses;
let's start a serious campaign to lobby for a publicly-financed election system;
Let's trade in our tent cities for a national Occupy tent lecture circuit;
Let's create a venture capital firm for green and 99%-friendly businesses;
Let's run some Occupiers in Congressional primaries;
Let's Occupy Congress until they end the revolving door between staffing and K street;
Let's start working groups that have demands and educate and advocate around those demands;
Hell, let's have a convention;
Let's go...

...we've built this beautiful platform for political engagement... let's start using it to its full potential, before its too late.

If we're loyal to a form, they can defeat us...they can figure out a way to evict a tent city or quash a march or silence a media campaign.

But If we're loyal only to a set of values -- that our society should be more fair and democratic; that our institutions should act in the public interest; that our government should be of the people, by the people and for the people -- If we're loyal to those values and if we're willing to come up with a bunch of exciting forms in which those values can be expressed... they can't stop us.

If we keep doing more of the same, we're on our way to fizzling out.
But if we come up with some new positives ideas and solutions,
If we put in the hard work and collaborative effort needed to implement them, and
If we to stay true to the spirit of our movement... we've only just begun!

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Nonprofits & Activism

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