No, it's not hopeless.

[Jackpine Radical]

There is a great deal to be frightened and angry about these days.

The people who created and profited immensely from the banking golem that crushed the economy in 2008 are about to walk with token fines while the full wrath of the Department of Justice falls upon medical marijuana.

Obama has opened up enough dirty-coal mining to more than offset all the progress his administration had made to date in greenhouse gas emissions.
And we still don’t know if the XL Pipeline is still on a fast track.

And there’s that whole surveillance thing, with each day a new set of revelations sending arctic blasts through the world’s various news trumpets.

What does one do in the face of all this? Let me point to the Occupy movement as an exemplar of what to do.

People criticized OWS because it had no leaders. Well, with no head to decapitate, leaderless organizations are much harder to kill. OWS had no specific causes ("Save the Skeet!&quot Of course not. their specific cause was a sort of meta-cause. The object of this cause was ALL OF IT.

This is species-survival territory we're treading on. Tinkering around the edges is not going to work. We have to very quickly and very massively prepare to change ALL OF IT.

Bloody revolutions do not work. They are not only more prone to fail than nonviolent campaigns, but in those cases where they succeed, the militarily supported leader ends up becoming dictator.
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OWS in its many mutations is maybe the key tool for effecting peaceful social transformations. I see the key to the power of OWS as deriving from its capacity to evolve rapidly as situations demand. To do this, they need to keep in strong contact with reality, which in the Internet age means being able to extract new meanings from the sea of information. The new meanings uniformly point to one thing: The one thing that most needs to change is ALL OF IT.

[bigtree]

1. one of the redeeming things about OWS is its success in changing the subject in DC

. . . and around the nation to a focus on economic fairness and opportunity.

Important to me, though, is the way in which supporters accepted, after a time, the value in working (on some level) to actually influence the current debate in our national legislature.

I' said, from the outset of OWS, that I believed the protests should consider a legislative focus to transform the activism into action. I still believe that neither can be truly successful without the other.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Suere, work the political system for all it's worth

as long as doing so doesn't cause you to drift too far from your original agenda.

But don't count on those institutionalized political means for real solutions.

[bigtree]

4. the national legislature is always going to be compromised

. . . at least until there's a successful national movement which compels clarity and focus on the people.

There is no successful movement without some eventual action in the legislature. There will be no successful progressiveness from our legislature without the protest actions.

[PowerToThePeople]

2. "This is species-survival territory"

Truth.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible.

There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always." Gandhi

[Jackpine Radical]

7. The complicating factor is that this time

we have a whole bunch of environmental bombshells of our own devising that are rapidly descending on us. I don't bring this up to discourage the idea that rapid change can occur, but the exploding environment is nevertheless a complicating factor in the sense that it introduces never-before-seen variables into the mix, rendering the situation quite unpredictable.

[Redneck_Dem]

6. People criticized OWS

because it had no direction that the average person was willing to rally around, and without that support, OWS ended up being nothing more than a sideshow.
As you said, their cause was everything, and to be honest, most people just don't care about everything.

[scarletwoman]

8. Demagogues know how to appeal to emotion & tribalism, which merely hardens

the already present tendency to limit perceptions.

The real work of liberation is teaching people to question their assumptions and preconceptions.

Everyone has filters through which they perceive "reality". The first step is to recognize that the filters exist, the next step is to encourage the adoption of possible alternate filters - to see things in a "new light", as it were.

The power of OWS was their active demonstration of seeing things in a new light. And it worked, the national conversation was changed, and seeds of new perceptions were planted.

sw

[Jackpine Radical]

10. Yes.

You get it. As always.

[kentuck]

12. I agree, Scarletwoman.

"The real work of liberation is teaching people to question their assumptions and preconceptions."

Very well said!

[LWolf]

9. I know that OWS has not disappeared.

I'd like to see a resurgence. The only real hope I've felt in the last several years was the action and energy of Occupy movements across the country.

[kentuck]

11. Big Kick and R !!!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

13. BIG K&R!

[Hekate]

14. KnR. Thanks, Jackpine...

This is good to read... my depression has kicked in, so reading that it's not hopeless is a good thing.