Outsource to Detroit. Credit: Natasha Louis
By Kim Hunter for Occupy Detroit Media
It can be hard to shake off training. My training has been in media and how to wage media campaigns. It may not surprise those of us living in a sound bite world, that media training is focused on being focused. Who’s the audience? What’s the message? How do we deliver it? Virtually everything in a media campaign or message flows from the answers to those three questions.
I asked myself those three questions when Occupy Wall Street with its large list of demands became public. There was, to me, a lack of “focus.” But it seemed almost academic. Those folks were carrying banners under which I could march, but they were hundreds of miles away. I wasn’t in a position to suggest anything in terms of “messaging.”
But the Occupy movement spread like wildfire and, before I knew it, the movement was in Detroit and
I was at the first General Assembly in Grand Circus Park on a Friday night. The meeting moved me. I
experienced a shift in my gut from the trepidation about the many causes under the Movement’s very
big tent. I was lifted by the people and the process.
The crowd was mostly white but People of Color and women were not just a sizable presence but at
the front, facilitating and moving things along. Baby boomers and older were there with the youth.
Whatever the inevitable comparison between the Occupy Movements and a certain other party, the
diversity, not just in the crowd but in those facilitating is a claim they can’t make. What’s more, Occupy
has gone international, like the open mourning after September 11, 2001 and the global antiwar protest
that followed.
Equally as inspiring as the diversity of the crowd was the process. Democratic consensus has issues. The
declaration that the folks leading the process were facilitators and not leaders points, if nothing else, to
the need for new ways to think and speak about leadership in a truly egalitarian process. The facilitators
at the front of the crowd led openly and transparently. They just didn’t want to be called leaders.
More important than the labels was what took place: all voices were heard and respected and this with
a crowd of hundreds. I felt that even with the flaws and potential pitfalls, an honest and open attempt
was being made to be the change we seek, to walk the talk on the way to a new and more just society,
to blend the method and the goal, the means and the end.
Speaking of goals, I felt like the process of the meeting was so educational and functioned so different
from what I assume (rightly or wrongly) most of our groups experience has been, that the meeting
itself was as valuable staking claim to the public park space. I realized that even a meeting being run to
reflect who we are and how we want to live is as valuable as the most succinct and powerful slogan.
Even so, the Media Committee has come up with a unifying framework for expressing the movement’s
aspirations and goals. If you want to know what they are, I hope you are present when it’s presented to the General Assembly so you can experience people working diligently to act more human.