The OccupyOakland General Assembly voted almost unanimously last night to employ a new tactic in their nonstop efforts to spread the #Occupy message and challenge the City of Oakland and the one-percent who control it. They came up with
The 24-hour vigil.
Before I explain further it should be noted that Frank Ogawa Plaza / Oscar Grant Park was not completely cleared by the Oakland Police on November 14th. Before the raid, Zachary Running Wolf Brown, aka RunningWolf, had #Occupied one of the trees in the plaza (as he had famously done before in Berkeley, along with running for its Mayor), and neither the police nor firefighters had the zeal to attempt to remove him from his perch. RunningWolf has been up in that tree, as the image shows, for twelve days now. (The Ohlone are Native Americans who once #occupied the Bay Area)
Today RunningWolf came down to present the vigil proposal to the General Assembly. The vigil concept has been vetted by a lawyer, who was also up on stage aiding in the presentation. The idea is to maintain a 24-hour presence in the plaza as a vigil to Oscar Grant, the young man who was killed by a BART policeman for, some would say, the crime of riding public transportation while black, and for whom #OccupyOakland renamed Frank Ogawa Plaza.
No sleeping will be permitted during the vigil, and thus no tents will be pitched for the purpose of camping. But in theory -- and that's a theory still to be tested -- other "tents" and tables and booths would be legal to maintain, so long as no one is residing in them.
By maintaining a 24-hour presence in the park, the #OccupyOakland movement will once again have a central location where people can come at any time of the day or night to hang out and find out the latest.
Should the City attempt to prevent these activities, the lawyer presenting the proposal stated that it would be possible to go to a judge and get a restraining order preventing the city from preventing #OccupyOakland from continuing to hold the "vigil".
Or so the theory goes.
Time will tell what the Mayor, The City Administrator, the City Council, Oakland's legal department, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and the Police Department have to say, and do, about it.
For the moment, RunningWolf is victorious, defying both gravity and the City of Oakland, no mean feat either of them.
8:50 AM PT: Speaking of vigils:
While most UC Berkeley students chose to head home for the Thanksgiving break, senior Alex Kim decided to do something decidedly different early Thursday morning.
Kim cancelled his plane ticket home and instead lugged camping equipment and his pet cat Obi to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s front lawn at around 5 a.m. There he pitched a tent in solidarity with the Occupy Cal movement that has shaken the campus over the last three weeks...
Kim said in written messages with The Daily Cal that he would stay on the lawn of Birgeneau’s campus home until he police arrest him. Kim welcomed others to join him and Obi underneath two large trees on the lawn.
http://www.dailycal.org/...