Family legend has it I was in the car, maybe a year or two old, when my father picked up Andrew Young to bring him to Wellesley College for some kind of activist event. This may not even be family legend but might be something I conjured up as a child based on things I'd overheard. Another snippet I've mentioned before as a way to summarize this part of my childhood is, "My father organized anti-war marches with Hillary Clinton." She was a student of his, as this article mentions (his last name is Santmire). The point is, as a young child I grew up around activists.

One issue that has been running around my mind was how the 60s organizing might have been different if the technology and culture we have today existed then. It's been my contention, so far, that if we were to put a magnifying glass up to the 60s groups as they muddled through their planning the way smartphones and youtube reporting covers the #OWS happenings things would have seemed different. The chaotic and disorganized clusters of people protesting all the things they're protesting don't have a cohesive voice, strong leadership, or any kind of clear goals. (Yet.) And, despite my not having watched or read a single bit of news coverage, I know this is the case. That things are messy is all over twitter, the blogs, and casual conversations.

What I began considering today was not how the activists are perceived as sloppy but how they might be behaving more sloppily than the 60s activists because of our modern culture and technology. At first I was passionately sure that if we looked at the 60s people as they were doing their planning, we would find just as much floundering as there is apparently happening in the #OWS groups. Now, I'm not so sure. Here's why I'm adjusting my ideas.

I brought myself back to the staircase of our house when I was little. I'd sneak down, avoiding the two creakiest steps, and sit on the 3rd lowest stair. From there I could see through the crack in the door a little bit and I could hear pretty clearly. My parents had, as my blurry child's memory holds, a lot of dinner parties. Gatherings of students, and lots and lots of get-togethers of faculty. There was a lot of wine, the occasional joint (though, wow, my father was furious if that happened when I was around as he and my mom were never druggies), and a lot of very loud conversation. Radical stuff. Planning.

Today I started imagining what it would be like if everyone at those get-togethers had smartphones and used twitter and blogging and email to blurt out things that were being said as they happened. How easily and quickly things would "get out" before they were ready. That's what's really interesting me now: how the organizing process is now inherently fast.

My own experience with organizing made clear that if you get more than one person involved in trying to come up a set of objectives, let alone try to set a course of action to achieve those goals, it's going to be complicated. People are messy. Very, very messy. But, because it's so easy to "publish" things and get "media coverage" in all of their forms, there's a slowness that's missing from the process.

Sure, the 60s were an explosive time and radical things happened. But these days most people, especially those of us in our 40s or younger, have grown up in the insta-culture. Things happen within 10 seconds or our attention is lost (made that up, but it feels right). Getting "media coverage" seems an important element to activism so a spectacle seems like a good idea, but the spectacle seems to be happening before the people involved had all of those potlucks with the wine flowing and the arguments about how far they should take things and what they should boycot and is violence ever justified and what is it exactly that we want?


I feel strongly that any activism, no matter what, is a move in the right direction for our country. It has been scary to me to realize how easy it is to slide into a very, very small world where all that matters is me and my children. As it stands, that has to be true for me for the short-term. That's okay. But when I come out of this time, and I will, I'll be active again. I'm not typical, though. My neighbors upstairs who are fighting (again) and don't have custody of their 4 children and the police visit every few weeks aren't going to go out and join the drumming horn blowers in downtown Portland to try to get policy changed so Goldman Sachs executives (for example) don't continue to hold our country hostage now that the precedent has been set with government bailouts. That won't happen.

So when there's all this talk about how disorganized and clueless the protesters are, I almost just laugh. I mean, at least those people are doing something instead of just complaining about how everyone else isn't doing things right.

Here's hoping there are groups within the larger groups that are pausing to breathe and finding ways to have those difficult and time consuming (when done well) organizing and strategy forming group sessions. I tend to believe that's happening, though I can't be sure. When I saw this video of a "teach in" associated with Occupy Boston, I was given some hope. Calling on those who have gone before might help the new blood slow the heck down just a little bit so they can figure out what they're doing and why. Then they can use the fancy schmancy technology and the media coverage they are getting to get the rest of us involved.

Real change can happen and it feels to me like it's starting to simmer... there might even be some gentle rolling bubbles happening in that pot over there. Just because a couple other pots on the stove exploded all over the kitchen doesn't mean there aren't a few dishes being cooked just right.