It doesn't seem as though London can offer much advice on midwestern US questions, but so be it. The Occupiers have never really been a particularly cohesive bunch. Perhaps the Londoners can take in the Tigers-Angels game tonight so that they may see how we Americans have improved on cricket. Well, they way the Tigers have been playing, perhaps that isn't such a good idea.
But anyway, Occupiers from around the central US are in town to meet and discuss urban issues. As with so many other conferences held by so many other organizations, even organizations with higher callings than the Occupy Movement, there will be workshops, and they will be useful. "All of our workshops are solution-based," Diara Lo, a member of Occupy Detroit, assures us. That's good to hear. We've grown weary of all the workshops in our lives which have not been solution based.
What are these workshops anyway? Well, yesterday there was one on the role of the banks in the destruction of Detroit. Sadly, we missed it. And we were so looking forward to the part of the talk where poor voting and poor political leadership have hurt the city.
There are a couple of DA events today. DA is short for direct action. We couldn't find out what they were or who they were directed towards, however. They're probably protests, but it's okay if we don't know exactly what they're protesting. They're listed as optional events. As such, we advise skipping them. If it isn't important enough even among the organizers to be made mandatory, then it isn't important enough to participate.
Actually, every time we click on a link at the website which purports to let everyone know what's happening at this conference, there's really little or no detail. Everything has been placed in convenient time slots, yet all we're told is that there's a movie screening which doesn't tell us which movie, panel discussions which don't always tell us what's to be discussed, working group sessions which give no clue as to what's to be worked on, and entertainment sessions which don't give us a clue as to who is to entertain us, although we strongly suspect that poetry is involved. The last event, listed as Monday at 1PM, is a 'fun time and clean up', whatever that entails. Still, we can understand it to a point. Going home was always the best part of conferences.
All of this is emanating from a nice building on Michigan Avenue in southwest Detroit, and another one on West Chicago which is more centrally located. Apparently camping out on public property has become tiresome for the Occupiers. Any way you slice it, you can't get help in your cause is your cause isn't well organized, and you can't accurately inform people of anything when you aren't exactly informing people of what to expect from you. And that is precisely the weakness of the Occupy Movement. They are protesting conditions they don't like, which is okay so far as it goes, yet they don't seem to have any idea what to do in their stead. It's as though they believe that protesting, which is essentially telling someone else to do something about something which the protestors don't like, is enough to make your point and to effect change.
It isn't. But what's reality when something has to be done about The Man, dude?
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