I had planned on doing some more of small town Occupy, but many of the stories are just to amazing to be meshed into a singular diary. So...instead I decided to pick apart our local Occupy through each individual and their experiences. I wanted to tell their stories of their experiences not just with the why they Occupy, but also the how.
And during my interviewing others and my own personal experiences with our Local Occupy movement I found that...time and time again references to "The Can Opener" would come up.
Occupy after the orange squiggle of power for more.
So you might be asking yourself, "What the hell does a can opener have to do with Occupy?"
Lets start with a quick overview of the simple device that is, the can opener.
Invented in response to the surge of canning, the can opener was designed to open cans quickly and easily. These cans contained food, very often used for marching armies. The openers allowed military men to enjoy a small taste of nutrition while fighting on the fronts of many wars throughout our history. So really the can opener has a very stoic history of being one of the many inventions of war.
However, our can opener here in South Bend has a slightly less violent but no less different story of being on the front of warfare.
We started our encampment at the corner of Jefferson and Michigan in front of the Wells Fargo building. Our initial rally, loosely mentioned in a previous diary, drew an initial 100 plus people to the location. We held an assembly, but unfortunately due to people unaware of the process...it was difficult at best.
That said we struggled on. Those TwentyFour Seveners, as we call them, now stuck it out without shelter. They slept on the streets, they ate in the streets, they WERE the streets.
People like myself who were still blessed with a home and job, tried as best we could to support them. We brought food, clothing, supplies, water, etc.. we brought it all. We had some amazing support early on in our encampment. A great specific example of this was Brunos Pizza across the street feeding our campers dinner every night or so, and is a large part of the reason we hold our General Assembly there to this day. Because really...what is more American than Democracy, Beer....and Pizza?
However the weather was not going to cooperate forever.
So it was on a cold November night that the rain began to move in. And move in it did.
It nearly sleeted that night we decided to move our camp. An emergency GA was held and during this GA it was ultimately decided to move to one of the local city parks that has no curfew. Only two exist in our local municipality, that being Leeper Park and the John Hunstman Park in front of the Morris Civic Theater.
It was initially decided to avoid the obvious conflict of the Morris and head to Leeper, however upon arrival our occupiers found the conditions to be...impossible to Occupy. There were no resources to utilize, conditions were a detriment, and there was a decidedly criminal element en masse.
To the Morris we went, and to the Morris we stayed....for awhile anyway.
You see the city was mostly amicable to our Occupy. They treated us with a very laissez faire strategy. We left them alone while we were at Wells Fargo and they left us alone as well. They wouldn't allow us tents while on our street corner....
But once we finally tent camped at the Morris, things changed slightly.
Immediately the City Attorney was involved. Immediately our initial requests to the Parks Department were finally responded to (those in the org work group tried to secure permits). All of a sudden we immediately had the spotlight put on us, and it was nice for once. We grabbed the mic of the narrative locally here!
Which brings me round circle to the Can Opener.
The City had promised us permits, a contract for occupation, a writ of...whatever the City had promised they had that we abide by these esoteric rules that no one had seen yet and still hasn't to this day..they would leave us alone. The problem was they never even told us the rules, they never delivered a contract, and they never delivered a writ of anything.
So we were left dealing with local ordinance, which denies camping in public spaces. Thankfully however one of our occupals (as we loosely define ourselves) had a great relationship with the local PD who essentially said "So long as you are not sleeping in the tents, we don't care"
Enter stage left...the Can Opener.
It initially started as a joke. Literally a joke. There was no can opener. We had started to use our being caught in a tent by any municipality people as a "I'm just looking for a can opener". Because we could not stay in the tents, but we were allowed full access to the tents for items, so long as we were only retrieving items from said tents.
So it was. The City Attorney would come by and state to those of us in the tents "Hey you guys, you are not allowed to stay in the tents" and we would reply "We're just looking for a can opener!"
And we would play this cat and mouse game for some weeks until we actually had a real can opener delivered to us from the out going City Mayor. It was then that we were galvanized in the realization, that the city was more supportive than we had initial thought. However that said, they were still bound by the laws and rules in place.
So we held this Can Opener, in awe at times, and used it as our "get out of jail free card" many times in our engagements with the city.
Eventually however, we had to decamp. We lacked the body support for winter, as many Occupy locations have...but the Can Opener prevailed our decampment. It was passed among many hands and eventually landed in the hands of an archivist at IUSB. This archivist was documenting not just our local movement but many Indiana locations. He was documenting the many publications, actions, items of each movement.
Those of us in the core group were appreciative of this, but also felt that the Can Opener needed more than that. So we requested from the archive that we please have the Can Opener back because of its symbolic status in Occupy South Bend.
They returned the Can Opener on the night of our most recent GA, and I can say it felt as if a treasured object returned home. It was as if a national artifact was returned to its native land.
So there it goes, the humble story of...the Can Opener. Once a utility device on the front lines of many violent wars throughout history, and now a metaphor;symbol;device on the front lines of our class warfare.