Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Cecily rushed through the tents which had lain there for four and a half years, gradually becoming more and more decrepit. Some had badly-patched holes and splits from end to end; quite a few others were simply covered with human shit - some members of the Occupy movement were less popular than others. Cecily's second tent had, itself, been targeted in such a way late one night, just a few weeks after she'd returned from jail. She had been arguing in favour of increased action in the Wall Street movement and had presumably rubbed some of the Negatives up the wrong way. Anyway. At least they hadn't been violent - that wasn't really in their nature, was it?
She reached the PrintShop. This consisted of around eight sheets of tarpaulin stretched haphazardly on lengths of metal piping, ultimately protecting several battered printers from the elements - it was sunny today, but Hurricane Sandy was still a deeply unpleasant memory. Poor Micah. At one end of the PrintShop, there was a room divider (well, two bedsheets suspended from a rope strung between the 'walls') beyond which Malcolm was supervising the whirring of the special printer - the 3-D printer. In this room, however, the throng of volunteers was collecting the outpourings of the old-school printers and stapling the disparate pages together on a sort of production line.
"Malcolm!" shouted Cecily.
"Yeah?" he replied over the hubbub, pushing aside a bedsheet to see her. This revealed not only his face, but also the plastic AK-47 in his hand and the ever-growing pile of the things behind him. Malcolm was fucking useless at this.
"Mind if I take one to disseminate?" Cecily had to raise her voice unpleasantly over the clatter and whir of the printers.
"Sure thing, Cis!"
"Cool, I'll see you at - "
Right as Malcolm interrupted her, the printers fell silent momentarily. "And the guns are coming along like crazy!" he shouted.
Everyone in the room turned to stare at Malcolm, some with excitement in their eyes, but the vast majority of those bedraggled souls had something akin to murderousness lurking in their dead, exhausted expressions.
Cecily grabbed a completed printout and dashed off. A quick glance behind her confirmed what she had expected to see: Malcolm was showing off his biceps to the whole PrintShop, showboating and kissing his well-developed arms and all that playacting shit. He wasn't as bad as he could be, really.
"Yee, if you like these guns, you should see deez nuts!"
Oh, God.
She made her way to a quieter part of Zuccotti Park, where a massive crowd of protesters was lying across one another in the best of the morning sunlight. It had been a hard winter, but luckily the donations over Patreon had kept most of them alive, healthy and in reasonable morale into 2016. If anything, it was the cops across the way who were looking more miserable now, in their near-permanent positions.
Now Cecily had tiptoed her way into the centre of the gaggle of a few hundred 'stinking hippies' as they were characterised in the mainstream media.
"Mic check!" she yelled. Obviously they had no actual microphones - the generator was expressly forbidden for any use other than the printers, the waffle iron and the coffee maker - but they had made do with this system since the start, all those endless years ago, and by the time Cecily had come back from jail (a couple of months at Rikers for assaulting a police officer) it had become not just a tradition but a Tradition.
"Mic check!" came a voice from a few feet away. Cecily vaguely recalled that his name was Mike, and he volunteered for this every time. At the beginning, his friends had thought this was moderately amusing. In 2014 the LOLs had become smiles. Now there was no response, but he kept doing it anyway.
"Mic check!" shouted a guy who worked the cookpots. He was pretty sweet on Cecily - gave her a dollop more than the official ration.
"Mic check!"
"Mic check!"
"Mic check!" This last voice, in an area of the crowd which was not already covered, was more reluctant than the rest, so Cecily pressed on. She held up the Occupied Times of London (International Edition) and read from the front page.
"News in brief: the Assembly of Assemblies has met in Reykjavik and elected Kalle Lasn as International Co-ordinator!" She paused.
"News in brief..." Mike repeated her words in his booming, well-practiced voice, in vague, halting unison with the other volunteers.
"...the Assembly of..."
"...Assemblies has met in..."
"...Reckywick and elected..."
"...Cally Laser and an International Co-ordinator."
Cecily continued when the last of the first wave fell silent, for there were others out of earshot who were repeating what they had heard from the first guys for the benefit of the rest of Zuccotti Park. "Occupy Reykjavik is now the highest authority in almost all of Iceland due to the non-violent aid of the Pirate Party there.
"Occupy London has been displaced from Finsbury Square, but the branches in Westminster Square, the London Stock Exchange, and Canary Wharf are still going strong. The LSE camp now extends onto Fleet Street.
"Occupy Tahrir Square has been set upon by the Army, and certain elements have become violent in response to this. It is recommended by Co-ordinator Lasn that General Assemblies debate the role of retaliatory violence in our movement in the traditional manner.
"Occupy Auckland have agreed with the New Zealand Government to establish a Safe Space in Aotea Square where oppressive State laws do not apply. There will be a referendum next week to decide on a flag for the Safe Space."
"...for the Safe Space." concluded Mike. One of his friends had run off to get him a bottle of water from the cooler, which he gargled at this point. Cecily paused while he finished before launching into the editorial.
Brothers, Sisters and Siblings,
You will have read the propagandistic news above with a light heart, but that is all it is: propaganda. What you are not being told is that our Movement is moribund.
Back in 2011, we were outraged; we were indignant. Our future had been stolen from us. We would be the first generation whose quality of life would be inferior to that of our parents. We were desperate, and we were in the right.
But what has come of our marathon. Those of you who have been here since the start - has your life been any better than it would have been had you stayed away? When you lived with your parents, did you have to shit in a bucket? If you did, you have my greatest sympathy. But Occupy has gone bad. At first the white heat of the fight against Austerity and Inequality, it has become a pale shadow of what it once was.
Until now, we have operated in ground-up direct democracy, but this has been ground up by the establishment of the Assembly of Assemblies. Why should we follow the edicts of our elected representatives? Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Indeed, the branch of the movement in Iceland has become a Government unto itself - it has sold out. It has, in its success, become an Occupation of nothing.
So while the Zuccotticrats attempt to neuter the People Power they themselves unleashed, let's consider what we've actually achieved. Well, we've diverted State resources into kettling us in. Some people have a slightly longer walk to work. And that's about it. No Governments have fallen except in the Arab Spring countries and, of course, Iceland. No banks have collapsed. Ian Lavery won't be Prime Minister after his corruption scandal broke yesterday; the Occupy Party in New Zealand got zero seats; Elizabeth Warren won't become President without a miracle, and even then, half the ideological currents in Occupy will hate her guts. Austerity still exists. And while some success has been had by anarchists, fighters for equality and leftists, the freedoms and public acceptance that have been won for trans people have been won by Caitlyn Jenner, not by us.
This is a bit shit.
But we can't give up. We must take back the movement we have fought for for so long. We must make this about equality, not governance. We must turn our demeanour from that of a sitting duck to a Raging Bull.
In short: we must Occupy Occupy.
If you want true reforms to be made to the movement, and to reject the authority of the undemocratic Assembly of Assemblies, move your tents to the middle of your protest area, bar yourselves off, and Occupy the Occupy protests.
Brothers, Sisters and Siblings!
I promise you it will work this time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fovargue had been a New York cop for as long as he could remember, and he'd been up close with Occupy day in and day out for the last four and a half years.
Never had he seen anything like this.
They'd moved their tents. About a third of the protesters had shifted their tents into the middle of Zuccotti Park, and were verbally abusing the other two thirds who were moving their own tents out the way for them. They were... they were beginning to protest themselves.
Scuffles were beginning to break out between the factions. People who had shat on other people's tents were being kicked in the shins. Little niggles that had seemed like harmless banter a few years ago were now becoming grounds for flying fists and snarling mouths now the blue touch paper had been lit. Occupy was going stir crazy.
"Base, base, do you copy?" radioed Mark, "This is Alpa Zero Foxtrot Niner Niner. Yeah, the fake newspaper worked. Nice job, guys, it's really hotting up here. Request backup immediately, and we'll clear them out over the next couple hours. Over."
Mark returned to watching the sport. Over at the PrintShop, a guy with really hench biceps was... wait... what was... um.
Shit.
There was a rat-a-tat-a-tat of gunfire.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
"Base, yeah, it's me again. Yeah. Uh... we're gonna need to get the Army on this, guys."
She reached the PrintShop. This consisted of around eight sheets of tarpaulin stretched haphazardly on lengths of metal piping, ultimately protecting several battered printers from the elements - it was sunny today, but Hurricane Sandy was still a deeply unpleasant memory. Poor Micah. At one end of the PrintShop, there was a room divider (well, two bedsheets suspended from a rope strung between the 'walls') beyond which Malcolm was supervising the whirring of the special printer - the 3-D printer. In this room, however, the throng of volunteers was collecting the outpourings of the old-school printers and stapling the disparate pages together on a sort of production line.
"Malcolm!" shouted Cecily.
"Yeah?" he replied over the hubbub, pushing aside a bedsheet to see her. This revealed not only his face, but also the plastic AK-47 in his hand and the ever-growing pile of the things behind him. Malcolm was fucking useless at this.
"Mind if I take one to disseminate?" Cecily had to raise her voice unpleasantly over the clatter and whir of the printers.
"Sure thing, Cis!"
"Cool, I'll see you at - "
Right as Malcolm interrupted her, the printers fell silent momentarily. "And the guns are coming along like crazy!" he shouted.
Everyone in the room turned to stare at Malcolm, some with excitement in their eyes, but the vast majority of those bedraggled souls had something akin to murderousness lurking in their dead, exhausted expressions.
Cecily grabbed a completed printout and dashed off. A quick glance behind her confirmed what she had expected to see: Malcolm was showing off his biceps to the whole PrintShop, showboating and kissing his well-developed arms and all that playacting shit. He wasn't as bad as he could be, really.
"Yee, if you like these guns, you should see deez nuts!"
Oh, God.
She made her way to a quieter part of Zuccotti Park, where a massive crowd of protesters was lying across one another in the best of the morning sunlight. It had been a hard winter, but luckily the donations over Patreon had kept most of them alive, healthy and in reasonable morale into 2016. If anything, it was the cops across the way who were looking more miserable now, in their near-permanent positions.
Now Cecily had tiptoed her way into the centre of the gaggle of a few hundred 'stinking hippies' as they were characterised in the mainstream media.
"Mic check!" she yelled. Obviously they had no actual microphones - the generator was expressly forbidden for any use other than the printers, the waffle iron and the coffee maker - but they had made do with this system since the start, all those endless years ago, and by the time Cecily had come back from jail (a couple of months at Rikers for assaulting a police officer) it had become not just a tradition but a Tradition.
"Mic check!" came a voice from a few feet away. Cecily vaguely recalled that his name was Mike, and he volunteered for this every time. At the beginning, his friends had thought this was moderately amusing. In 2014 the LOLs had become smiles. Now there was no response, but he kept doing it anyway.
"Mic check!" shouted a guy who worked the cookpots. He was pretty sweet on Cecily - gave her a dollop more than the official ration.
"Mic check!"
"Mic check!"
"Mic check!" This last voice, in an area of the crowd which was not already covered, was more reluctant than the rest, so Cecily pressed on. She held up the Occupied Times of London (International Edition) and read from the front page.
"News in brief: the Assembly of Assemblies has met in Reykjavik and elected Kalle Lasn as International Co-ordinator!" She paused.
"News in brief..." Mike repeated her words in his booming, well-practiced voice, in vague, halting unison with the other volunteers.
"...the Assembly of..."
"...Assemblies has met in..."
"...Reckywick and elected..."
"...Cally Laser and an International Co-ordinator."
Cecily continued when the last of the first wave fell silent, for there were others out of earshot who were repeating what they had heard from the first guys for the benefit of the rest of Zuccotti Park. "Occupy Reykjavik is now the highest authority in almost all of Iceland due to the non-violent aid of the Pirate Party there.
"Occupy London has been displaced from Finsbury Square, but the branches in Westminster Square, the London Stock Exchange, and Canary Wharf are still going strong. The LSE camp now extends onto Fleet Street.
"Occupy Tahrir Square has been set upon by the Army, and certain elements have become violent in response to this. It is recommended by Co-ordinator Lasn that General Assemblies debate the role of retaliatory violence in our movement in the traditional manner.
"Occupy Auckland have agreed with the New Zealand Government to establish a Safe Space in Aotea Square where oppressive State laws do not apply. There will be a referendum next week to decide on a flag for the Safe Space."
"...for the Safe Space." concluded Mike. One of his friends had run off to get him a bottle of water from the cooler, which he gargled at this point. Cecily paused while he finished before launching into the editorial.
The Long March to Freedom
Brothers, Sisters and Siblings,
You will have read the propagandistic news above with a light heart, but that is all it is: propaganda. What you are not being told is that our Movement is moribund.
Back in 2011, we were outraged; we were indignant. Our future had been stolen from us. We would be the first generation whose quality of life would be inferior to that of our parents. We were desperate, and we were in the right.
But what has come of our marathon. Those of you who have been here since the start - has your life been any better than it would have been had you stayed away? When you lived with your parents, did you have to shit in a bucket? If you did, you have my greatest sympathy. But Occupy has gone bad. At first the white heat of the fight against Austerity and Inequality, it has become a pale shadow of what it once was.
Until now, we have operated in ground-up direct democracy, but this has been ground up by the establishment of the Assembly of Assemblies. Why should we follow the edicts of our elected representatives? Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Indeed, the branch of the movement in Iceland has become a Government unto itself - it has sold out. It has, in its success, become an Occupation of nothing.
So while the Zuccotticrats attempt to neuter the People Power they themselves unleashed, let's consider what we've actually achieved. Well, we've diverted State resources into kettling us in. Some people have a slightly longer walk to work. And that's about it. No Governments have fallen except in the Arab Spring countries and, of course, Iceland. No banks have collapsed. Ian Lavery won't be Prime Minister after his corruption scandal broke yesterday; the Occupy Party in New Zealand got zero seats; Elizabeth Warren won't become President without a miracle, and even then, half the ideological currents in Occupy will hate her guts. Austerity still exists. And while some success has been had by anarchists, fighters for equality and leftists, the freedoms and public acceptance that have been won for trans people have been won by Caitlyn Jenner, not by us.
This is a bit shit.
But we can't give up. We must take back the movement we have fought for for so long. We must make this about equality, not governance. We must turn our demeanour from that of a sitting duck to a Raging Bull.
In short: we must Occupy Occupy.
If you want true reforms to be made to the movement, and to reject the authority of the undemocratic Assembly of Assemblies, move your tents to the middle of your protest area, bar yourselves off, and Occupy the Occupy protests.
Brothers, Sisters and Siblings!
I promise you it will work this time.
Mark Fovargue had been a New York cop for as long as he could remember, and he'd been up close with Occupy day in and day out for the last four and a half years.
Never had he seen anything like this.
They'd moved their tents. About a third of the protesters had shifted their tents into the middle of Zuccotti Park, and were verbally abusing the other two thirds who were moving their own tents out the way for them. They were... they were beginning to protest themselves.
Scuffles were beginning to break out between the factions. People who had shat on other people's tents were being kicked in the shins. Little niggles that had seemed like harmless banter a few years ago were now becoming grounds for flying fists and snarling mouths now the blue touch paper had been lit. Occupy was going stir crazy.
"Base, base, do you copy?" radioed Mark, "This is Alpa Zero Foxtrot Niner Niner. Yeah, the fake newspaper worked. Nice job, guys, it's really hotting up here. Request backup immediately, and we'll clear them out over the next couple hours. Over."
Mark returned to watching the sport. Over at the PrintShop, a guy with really hench biceps was... wait... what was... um.
Shit.
There was a rat-a-tat-a-tat of gunfire.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
"Base, yeah, it's me again. Yeah. Uh... we're gonna need to get the Army on this, guys."
