I posted a diary last Tuesday on the end of the continuous occupation of Occupy Orange County after 157 days and 5 hours. It went pretty much nowhere. Well, to hell with that. Maybe it was destined to be a weekend diary; I'll choose an enticing generic title this time and see.
The original diary was entitled "Occupy OC camp closes after 3773 consecutive hours." Let that sink in for a moment. From 10 a.m. on October 15 to last Tuesday at 3 p.m., there was not a moment that Occupy Orange County was not either in an encampment, protesting on the sidewalks or other agreed-upon places, or (for the last hour) meeting with City Officials as we decided to disband.
We did this in the very engine room in the conservative movement of the U.S. We did it in the county that gave the county Richard Nixon and the funding for Ronald Reagan. We did it in the county that gives the world Orly Taitz and Rick Warren, Revs. Wiley Drake and Robert Schuler, Dana Rohrabacher and (starting next year) Darrell Issa, Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, the prime site for white flight from Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s.
We did it non-violently. We did it while evading the "right to assemble and speak" issues that have consumed most Occupations. We did it without an arrest for anything related to protest until almost the end. We stuck like a stubborn grain of sand in the eye of our conservative county, doing missionary work for the Occupy message in some of the least hospitable territory around. We formed a political coalition of leftists, Paulistas, self-described anarchists, mainstream Dems, radical environmentalist vegans, and the newly politicized and uncommitted -- and we've forged lines of productive internal communication that usually exist even in theory.
And we're not done. We're just among the last to leave Occupy Phase 1.0.
I'm off to our first General Assembly after the end of our continuous 24/7 occupation in a few hours. And yes, in the meantime, I would like people to pay attention. We didn't bleed, as the news demands, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't lead.
Who am I within Occupy Orange County? I'm a "Civic Liaison," meaning that I deal with local governments, including police departments, as a planner, negotiator, and trouble-shooter. I've also been more influential that I could have ever expected in fashioning the philosophy presented below -- and worked harder than I could have ever feared in keeping our occupation going for so long without a break.
Our Non-Violence
A vigorous debate is taking place within the Occupy movement about “diversity of tactics” – that linked article gives a great background on the dispute, by the way, for anyone who interested — which for some people means the legitimacy of resorting to means that are not “non-violent.” I phrase that as a double negative because most “not non-violent” actions are not ones that most of us would be likely to consider to be violent. I’m not talking about shootouts or slugfests or stone throwing at the police. We just don’t do that sort of thing in Orange County.
One reason is because we know who has more firepower, especially here in the home of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. We know that, unlike Tea Partiers, if we showed up to our events armed, we’d be shot to death, just as Trayvon Martin (even had he turned 18) would not have really had the same Second Amendment right to carry a gun as did George Zimmerman. But that's not the main reason.
The main reason that we have been non-violent from the start is that we know our audience. Go back and read Saul Alinsky (as conservative activists certainly do): one thing you have to do is to know your audience -- the people whom you are trying to reach. For some "audiences," seeing willingness to stand down the cops and take a beating is popular. For others, it's alienating.
People come to Orange County, and many other suburban and exurban areas, because they want to be safe and secure. (Well, the white people do. Others often come here either because of existing ethnic communities, as with our significant Asian and Latino minority populations, or because there are jobs -- often with employers who don't ask too many questions about immigration status and are happy to pay cash under the table.) When people associate the presence of people with a threat to their safety, they will turn against the group immediately. It does not matter who started it; it does not matter who's right. If a police officer clubs someone over the head in Orange County, popular sentiment will be with the person holding the club rather than holding their head. Popular sentiment can change well after the fact, as with the fatal beating of the homeless Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, but that's the exception to the rule.
What that meant is that we tried to avoid confrontation with police where possible, while being resigned to its possibility if it was inevitable. (Many people in Occupy OC didn't like our pacifism; they have organized trips to Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Riverside where they could confront cops. That's not a problem with our philosophy; we're concerned with the tactics used here at home. If people want to "get their fair share of abuse" in another county, go for it.) This meant that we expanded the definition of unacceptable violence to include intentional property damage.
Even that is a misleading term. ”Property damage” may be taken to mean arson or sabotage of public systems — which no one here supports. Some people in the movement who promote diversity of tactics favor things like breaking windows — something that would clearly qualify as vandalism — or spray-painting graffiti. Most of us, especially in Orange County, do not. Doing that changes the subject of conversation to our actual criticisms of corporate-dominated governance to the subject of whether we should be allowed to break windows. Frankly, we’re on less firm moral ground there, so many of us think: why change the subject from our critique? We're missionaries, not soldiers -- though, like most missionaries, we're willing to put ourselves in harm's way for a cause.
Our compliance
“Diversity of tactics” in Orange County has a different meaning that you’ll see in the article linked above. Our disagreements have been mostly over civil disobedience — and there is mutual respect between the camps even where we disagree. Should people be able to trespass on abandoned property, refuse police orders to disperse, chain themselves to objects, protest (even loudly) where they’re not wanted, etc.? Our non-violent forebears, from Jesus (who, by the way, did also "vandalize" the money-changers’ operation in the temple) to Gandhi to King to Mandela to Aung San Suu Kyi — have all engaged in civil disobedience. The question — for them and for us — is how effective it will be in a given situation.
Occupy Orange County has had in effect three main groups (plus a number of others limited to specific cities, who affiliate in spirit but don’t apparently meet regularly): Occupy Santa Ana, what I'll call the Traveling Encampment, and what I’ll call the Anti-Campers. In practice, many people affiliate with and shift between more than one group.
When I talk about the 3773 straight hours of occupation without a break, I'm talking about the Traveling Encampment, which began in Irvine, shifted to Fullerton on January 8, and then moved to Huntington Beach around roughly March 6. (Advance crews staked out territory before each major move so that our presence would be continuous.)
Why, by the way, did we care about the 3773-hour streak? Essentially, marketing. If we're not going to impress people with our incredible fighting skills, we have to impress them with something else -- in our case, our persistence and dedication. It is not easy, at all, to keep a motley and ill-funded group together for that long without a minute's break; the effort won us widespread grudging respect. That in turn made it easier for us to reach people in the community.
How do the groups differ? Occupy Santa Ana believes in active civil disobedience; it members are gearing up for a protest over homelessness next Friday. (Santa Ana, the largest and most Latino city in the county, is the county's "dumping ground" for the homeless. This isn't hidden; it's county policy). The Traveling Encampment doesn’t engage in active civil disobedience -- and yet we get along just fine. How this works out is useful for other cities' occupations to consider.
If you want to engage in civil disobedience, go hang out with Occupy Santa Ana. If you don’t — at least barring extreme circumstances such as abject repression of First Amendment rights — hang out with the Traveling Encampment. If you decide to do something different once day, go to the other one. If Santa Ana has something going that needs help from the encampment, or vice-versa, they send out the request. If another Occupation in the region has something going on, as recently happened with an Occupy LA action, people from either or both groups may go there and do whatever people there do.
Meanwhile, the third group — people who don’t think that there should be a permanent encampment or civil disobedience, but that we should still have marches and events to promote the Occupy message — do their own thing. (The power of what they can do, though, is enhanced by its sharing the same banner with the rest of us. The continuing presence of Occupy OC can turn a rally by Anti-Campers from being a one-off to one event in a continuing series. Everybody wins!) All of us sometimes mix, and sometimes mix it up, in our message boards.
This is such a good system that I wish that we could claim that we came up with it intentionally, but it just sort of evolved. The relevant rules, in effect, are these:
- don’t engage in property damage in Orange County, period;
- if you want to engage in civil disobedience, stick with Santa Ana;
- if you don’t want civil disobedience but do want an encampment for purposes of outreach and esprit d’corps (and at this point out of sheer interest in extending our world record for largest continuous engagement in Occupy encampment), be part of the Traveling Encampment;
- if you just want to spread the message without the above, do your own thing as “Occupy 2.0″-style non-campers.
This division of labor makes sense. Santa Ana is “urban” Orange County — as well as being the centrally located “dumping ground” that the rest of the city uses for the homeless. People will react differently to civil disobedience there than elsewhere. If you live in most of Santa Ana, you’ve already decided that you’re not all that interested in the wealthy and domestic Newport Beach, Anaheim Hills, or Coto de Caza experience.
For most of the rest of Orange County, civil disobedience is alienating. You can do it where people live, but they will tend to freak out, distance themselves, call the cops, and hide their children. Simply engaging in lawful protest is enough to rock their world. Suburban Orange County — commonly referred to as “Orange County” — has learned to shrug off most single-day protests as just eccentrics being themselves; what is different about the Traveling Encampment is that it persists for weeks and so becomes a point of continued irritation, titillation, and interest. Because it is lawful, it brings out lots of people in support of the Occupiers who in the process learn that others around them share the same interests and perspectives. It is, in a fanciful way, like a 1930 speakeasy, a 1950s jazz club, a 1970s gay bar, a 1990s poetry slam — a place where people who think about themselves and the world differently can meet to act on that understanding — in this case, to foster appropriate change.
Except for this: you don’t have to go to downtown LA (or Santa Ana) for it. The idea has been that this traveling carnival will come to your town! Of course, we've known that someday a city might decide not to put up with the "traveling carnival" for its residents and the Traveling Encampment may turn to civil disobedience as the best of bad options. What I and others have been trying to do is to forestall that day.
That day came this past Tuesday. For reasons explained below, we decided to disband. There's a reason that endurance records are hard to set and to break, and we had done as much as we could in the face of resistance.
Ending our streak
Occupy OC people had been staying overnight in Huntington Beach, called "Surf City," for about two weeks. In Irvine, we had established a permanent campsite on the City Hall lawn within 10 days; in Fullerton, largely based on the good recommendation we had from Irvine, it had taken less than a day to find temporary lodging and we soon moved on to a more visible and extended location. Unlike our experiences with Irvine and Fullerton, we had not come to an agreement with the city on a permanent campsite. Huntington Beach, unlike the college and corporate center of Irvine and the college and commercial center of Fullerton, is very much of a tourist town. It had sensitivities that the other cities did not and was bent on protecting itself.
At the end of the first week of Occupation -- meaning people staying up all night in public areas, then waving signs and meeting people during the day -- things looked like they might work out for a "permanent site" in the city's Central Park. But communication, command, and control — those necessities of any offensive — were lacking. The city’s demand that Occupy file a permit had not been passed up to those people who would have sought one. The Police decided, after a week of no response for us, that it was time to prod us into action. At around 7 a.m., they showed up and ticketed people who were sleeping in bags during the day. (We had thought that they were safe if they slept during the day; the message that they weren't, at least with cooking utensils and in effect luggage all over the place, had not percolated to those of us who should have been negotiating on their behalf. About a dozen people received criminal citations for “lodging” — often a questionable assertion by municipal governments against the homeless – on the morning of Tuesday March 13. (One of our earliest fights with the City of Irvine during the third week of October 2011 was whether merely sleeping in a bag on the ground constituted “lodging.”)
That afternoon -- I don't know if it was intended as a response -- two people from the Occupy movement, one who had come up from San Diego and one who had come down from Long Beach, did a little "protest art." They did a mic check in a Chase Bank in tony Huntington Harbor and announced that they wanted to "pretty up" the bank, tossing glitter (and, we were later told, rice), then writing an anti-illegal foreclosure message in dry-erase marker on the window. As "vandalism" goes, this was not very vandalism-y, but it did technically fall into the category and the bank branch determined to press charges. (The alleged perps remain on the lam.)
Despite Occupy HB disavowing and condemning the action (because it's the sort of thing that would alienate the community without winning over hearts and minds) our relations with the most sympathetic members of the City Council, Joe Shaw and Connie Boardman, became strained. Boardman conveyed to us an “if this happens one more time …” message. Shaw pointed out that he was having enough time getting to the four votes needed allowing us to camp if he included Boardman; we’d have no chance without her.
Then, afternoon in the afternoon of Monday, March 19, two other participants in the encampment apparently decided that it would be a great idea to conduct a “dine and dash” at a local restaurant — this is not in keeping with the Occupy OC philosophy, which has included volunteer work in food banks — and were promptly arrested. (I later heard that they blame a third party who had dined with them, went to the restroom, and ran away, but I have no confirmation.)
Having spent many hours as Civic Liaison for the Irvine and the (nearby for me) Fullerton Occupations, I had not intended to play a hands-on role with the Huntington Beach occupation, about an hour away from me without traffic. Mike Anderson, our Civic Liaison on the spot who had trained with me in Fullerton, received an e-mail from Boardman withdrawing her intention to introduce resolutions of the sort that had been considered by the Fullerton City Council -- reinvestment in local community banks and credit unions and working against easy credit scams for students, both of which passed, and opposition to Citizens United, which failed by a vote.) So much for getting the council to vote for a more permanent camp. Rather than address these new charges, we decided that under the circumstances it would be best not to even show up and say howdy at that night’s meeting.
We had a meeting scheduled for 2 p.m. the following day afternoon with City Manager Fred Wilson, Police Chief Kenneth Small, and City Attorney Jennifer McGrath. The first thing they did when I entered the room (a couple minutes after seven of the people who had been cited for lodging) was to circulate to me lovely, heavy-stock, glossy prints of the photos that uniformed officers had taken of the campers-in-search-of-a-camp.
I hate to admit this, but it was pretty clear: this was lodging lodging, not “pretext” lodging. We had homeless people who didn’t have anyplace else to stow their things, some of whom were intent on trying to heat food. That shouldn't be a crime, but under state law one can't lodge in public. While Beach and PCH had been intended as a stopgap location on our way to a longer-term camp, it was fair to say that even without our erecting tents the city could probably make a lodging charge stick.
So, what do we do? Huntington Beach Police had been courteous to the campers throughout the two weeks there. Normally, you try to choose a ripe target for civil disobedience, and Huntington Beach had been pretty reasonable to us — and, in any event, with our reduced numbers we weren’t prepared for it. The City Attorney said that she would retain, but not file, the charges so long as the infractions were not repeated. If they were repeated, it would likely lead to arrest. The best way to do that, we agreed (after a lot of Facebook discussion earlier in the day), was to try to move the encampment out of the city. Some efforts we had had underway failed to materialize — and so we ended our streak.
Had this happened in Irvine, we would have fought it. Had this happened in Fullerton, we probably would have fought it as well. But now in our third city and after five months, our numbers were depleted and those remaining in the camp (though not in the rest of the movement) were generally young, homeless, and (in the aggregate, at least) with criminal records and in some cases bench warrants from out of state -- based on charges that may or may not have been legitimate. They would pay the price, potentially starting right then, without a resolution.
The middle-class activists of the early days have over time been largely replaced by lower-class homeless — but that they are in that category should not be taken as a reason to debase them. We told them, based on our understanding of the law, that they had to stay up all night so as to avoid being cited. And they did. They slept, when they could, during the day. This is not easy, especially in the rain and wind and oceanfront cold. Had they just been looking for a warm place to sleep, they could have found better ones these past two weeks. Had they not cared about the ideals of the movement as well as the lodging, they would have gone elsewhere when the going got tough. But they didn’t; they stood tough. Call them homeless, sure, but you can’t call them heartless or powerless. People who think that people like me and other home-based Occupiers were serving them fail to understand that that, by holding the fort, were also serving us.
Sure, they wanted a safe place to sleep, but we could no longer provide one -- and we could not likely gin up a protest at their arrest when the police had made a pretty solid case about "lodging." To be fair, 3773 hours (out of an 8784-hour leap year) is something significant. It hurt to walk away from it, but after a while it becomes the record driving the occupation rather than the needs of the movement doing so. And it was these vulnerable people, not those of us who had started the movement here, who would pay the price of our taking a stand. It was time to leave, to recover, to recoup, and then perhaps to begin again with the clock reset to zero. With the consent of those facing arrest, I accepted the deal. Some people cried, but no one objected.
Moving on
Now people are dispersed. A man of around 60 (who had not been cited) named Dave — wild-bearded, good-humored, piercing-eyed, and very experienced at being homeless — will continue to go to the Huntington Beach Pier during daytime hours and circulate petitions against GMO foods. Stop by and see him sometime, sign his petitions, and tell him that I sent you. (If you drop him a buck or two, maybe you’ll help him find a room for the night.) Others are living the lives that the homeless do; many others of us remain in our homes, preparing for days of action as the rest of the nation thaws out this spring. And, today, the whole county gets together as one movement for pretty much the first time since at least October.
In talking to the Huntington Beach brass at that meeting, many of the Occupiers recounted the great interactions they’ve had with the citizens of the somewhat quirky city (which is, by the way, where I grew up.) For every sneer of “get a job,” one said, five people reacted positively. Their disappointment came largely from their sense that they did feel that they were accomplishing something, on a one-to-one basis, with citizens who wanted to learn more about them — and who were often surprised and pleased to learn that the Occupy Wall Street movement had, quite literally, landed on their local shores.
We agreed with the city officials that we would be able to come back to Huntington Beach during the daytime and continue our activities, reaching out to citizens and to tourists. We’ll meet with the Chief of Police to determine how to do so while offering the most to the City and causing the least reasonable disruption to its tourism industry. If this was a defeat, it was one with a bright silver lining and much hope for the months to come.
But like others, right now, I’m tired and stunned. To the last, I thought that we would somehow find another good location for an encampment at the last minute -- but we didn’t. It’s OK. Some people wailed after leaving the City Hall that they'd devoted so much to the movement and now it was for nothing. But the time we’ve put in has not been wasted; we've touched tens of thousands of people in person and more through the mostly positive coverage we're received. More than anything else, we've shown that this sort of thing is possible, even in Orange County. The seeds we have planted in Orange County civic culture will continue to grow. Things will just, at least for a while, be different.
We end our meetings here with the statement that “The Occupation Continues.” It does — but now, at long last, our physical presence is intermittent. I think that the action in Santa Ana on March 30 will be good. And I think that someday the physical occupation will be back. There’s too much passion in this group for it to remain dormant for long.
That's how the Occupy Wall Street movement looks today from conservative Orange County, 3773 hours and four days after we first took to the public lawn. And now I'm off, within a half-hour or so, to that General Assembly.
What are you still doing with the Occupy movement where you live?