[lbo-talk] Subject: Amusing OWS story

michael perelman michael.perelman3 at gmail.com
Sun Oct 30 21:37:42 PDT 2011


Chico is weird. Butte County is the most conservative in California, but Chico is a pretty liberal college town. There is a little occupation, but all my spare time is in cleaning out my office. Your story did cheer me up.

My home town is a big time fracking disaster, but it was a rustbelt disaster beforehand, 18 miles east of Youngstown & not much better off.

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Chris Sturr <sturr at dollarsandsense.org> wrote:
> Michael: I don't find that story about your home-town facebook page
> amusing--I find it discouraging. But good for you for persisting, and in
> good humor.
>
> Maybe the approach with the woman who mentioned ACORN is not to tell her it
> sounds like Fox News, but to press that point on the merits: has she
> visited any of the encampments or read about them?  There is pretty
> obviously not any big money behind them, and what supplies they have are
> donated from ordinary people.  Etc.  But you've probably tried that kind of
> thing.
>
> An anecdote that has encouraged me is in the opposite direction: when I was
> in DC last week, I was at crosswalk waiting for a light, on my way toward
> an #OccupyDC BoA micro-protest, which we could see and hear from across the
> intersection (the streets were busy with pedestrians because it was
> lunchtime).  I turned to a conservatively dressed woman next to me and
> said, "These people are heroes," not knowing how she would respond (but she
> looked like she might well be the type to say something about ACORN).  She
> smiled and responded: "It's about time." Later, watching the same group of
> #OccupyDC march noisily back toward Macpherson Square, I cheered them from
> the sidelines, which was all it took to get a several other lunchtime
> gawkers to cheer also.
>
> I thought that meant that even in DC, where people seem very buttoned-up
> and conservative, there was support for the Occupiers just below the
> surface. But maybe that's the difference between a big east-coast city and
> a more rural place like your hometown.  I wonder what tactics, beyond
> Facebook, would help garner sympathy for #OWS in such areas (and organizing
> around it).
>
> Also: note this piece in today's NYT about hydrofracking pitting neighbor
> against neighbor in Cooperstown NY (near my hometown of Syracuse):
> www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/nyregion/in-cooperstowns-fight-over-gas-drilling-civility-is-fading.html.
> I can't even think about fracking in the beautiful Finger Lakes without
> getting pissed off.
>
> Message: 16
>> Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:25:25 -0700
>> From: MICHAEL YATES <mikedjyates at msn.com>
>>
>> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>> Message-ID: <COL107-
>> W1584D7F2FA56D110F9B14CBBD10 at phx.gbl>
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>>
>>
>> There is a facebook page devoted to people who grew up during the 1950s
>> and 1960s in my hometown of Ford City, Pennsylvania. Every now and then I
>> post something of contemporary relevance. I have posted about Marcellus
>> shale drilling in the area, the burning of all sorts of toxic trash in
>> people's backyards, and a coupe of days ago, about OWS. Each time, the
>> responses have been vitriolic. I have been called a communist, a person
>> with ulterior motives, a person pressing his agenda on others, a deeply
>> unhappy person, a person trying to ruin the happy memories of others, and
>> so forth. People won't even admit that there was and is lots of racism in
>> the town. I was called unhappy for bringing this up. In the OWS post, I
>> simply asked what people from and in my hometown thought of OWS. When one
>> person replied with nonsense about how ACORN was behind this and it was all
>> a plot by Obama to manipulate us, I responded by saying that this seemed
>> straight out of Fox News. Then all hell br!
>>  oke loose. The consensus seemed to be that the site was suppposed to be
>> about people's happy memories of those halcyon days when they grew up. When
>> all was right with the world. Something was seriously wrong with me for
>> bringing up politics. One person said that the town was such a happy place
>> that when we left the town, we all got a rude awakening from the real
>> world. And she doubted that we talked about or knew about politics when we
>> were young.  OWS has hit a nerve for maybe millions of us. However, while
>> my hometown is today a particularly fucked up place, I always try to
>> remember that there is plenty of hate out there for us too. So we really do
>> need to stick together, to act as if an injury to one of us really is an
>> injury to all of us. Let's disagree, vigorously and sometimes impolitely,
>> but let's always give the right answer to the question, Which Side Are You
>> On.
>>
>
>
> --
> --
> Chris Sturr
> Co-editor, Dollars & Sense
> 29 Winter St.
> Boston, Mass. 02108
> phone:  617-447-2177, ext. 205
> fax:    617-447-2179
> email:  sturr at dollarsandsense.org
> ___________________________________
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>

-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com



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