Thursday, October 06, 2011

Mounting a Surprise Mass Demonstration

Something like Occupy Wall Street's peculiar genesis was probably necessary given that peaceful mass demonstration in recent years (by the left, at least) is simply ignored as business as usual from the "professional left" and anything planned with the slightest radical edge is infiltrated by domestic espionage operations, broken up by pre-emptive raids and met in the streets well-prepared militarized police ready to put hundreds of people into, well, intentionally not well prepared jails. Wrong-footing the cops (and Bloomberg) was way more important than getting people organized or even widely aware of what was going down.

Regarding having a clear agenda, well, if someone as occasionally reasonable as John Merrow can worry that an educational policy rally headlined by the likes Deborah Meier, Linda Darling-Hammond, Diane Ravitch, Pedro Noguera won't clearly state what it is for or against, then this criticism is just a meaningless tic that will be rolled out for every progressive protest.

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