Tents scare fascists because destroying the American sense of community has been a core objective of the nation’s Capitalist plutocracy and right-wing political alignment since the late 1930s.
Tent encampments which are part of social justice and protest movements have been cleared under the orders of the capitalist ruling class by their working class right wing storm troopers, the police and the military for over a century. They have been attacking people living in tent communities since Douglas MacArther machine gunned members of the Bonus Army marching on the bridge into DC in 1933. You may recall the violent clearance of migrant worker communities described in the Grapes of Wrath. Fallowing Hurricane Katrina, activists constituting camps in the City of New Orleans where they managed to establish mutual aid and stockpile survival supplies were forcibly disbursed. Occupy was driven from its encampments across the nation after only a few weeks in 2011. Now protest encampments across the US are being cleared with brutal crackdowns.
It is the obligation of every mature activist in the US to come to the aid and assistance of these demonstrators.
I’m an attorney, activist and writer in Charleston, SC. I helped organize the local Occupy encampment in 2011. I’ve organized dozens of protests, including the Blue Cell Rebel Elves Black Friday Protests against Walmart. I’ve also convened hundreds of community events: concerts, farmers markets, art exhibits, children’s activities and a ten year campaign for better public transit.
Why do these tent encampments threaten people who live in Penthouses and on Country Estates with golden toilets, horse barns and six bay garages surrounded by security staff and manicured grass no one ever walks on? We haven’t seen students from Columbia taking the subway to Connecticut to attack the mansions of the rich? They haven’t left their tents to lay siege to Trump Tower? No one has found large stocks of weapons and ammunition among them. They’ve found bottled water, Wi-Fi equipment and ramen cups. What is going on in these camps, and their historic predecessors, that terrifies the ruling elite.
Those of us in our sixties, like me, may not grasp how completely the American neighborhood and community have been dissolved by the power of industrial capitalism, mass media and the excruciating emptiness of the Walmart landscape. These students have grown up with 24/7 adult supervision into their teens in landscapes where nothing happens within walking distance. Participation in church, scouting programs and municipal level politics has fallen to residual levels. People born in this century have lived through two wars, two major economic collapses, the long shadow of 911 and the first (and God if he is merciful, last, and only) Trump Presidency. Their lives are saturated with electronic distraction, which on a personal level reduces to an acidic level of shallow social competition. In their world, nothing lasts, and nothing can be trusted.
Their world is that way because most of it is unreal. It’s been concocted and marketed to control them. It’s the product of computers and electronically harvested data. Soon it will be generated by AI algorithms which will insert themselves into ordinary communication.
Most young people accept these conditions without protest. They resent their activist peers who stand up, act out and attempt to find valid human relationships on a scale which enables what we used to call citizenship. Most young people, like most of their parents, medicate away their sense of anxiety and disappointment. Zoloft cures the relationship with our world forced on us by a society which values only production and consumption. It is truly radical to demand more.
We have moved well beyond the Nixonian deal with the Devil where the youth of America were promised toys for good behavior. The Vietnam protest encampments were cleared by getting most of that generation to accept a deal where they could wear their faded tie dye in their vinyl suburban houses if they showed up for work and didn’t cause problems. By 1980, most Americans were more interested in Money than sex and ideas like social justice and self-realization had been lost on the way to the big box stores. Ronald Reagan repackaged America using ideals from 1950s movies and television and most people bought it. While we put the cost of that delusion on the national plastic, our change to renovate our industrial base and convert our energy infrastructure slipped away, run over by the huge amounts needed to keep the oil flowing to fuel the economy and the transportation of the past.
However, the suburban life of the generation driven to school in the family SUV was radically different from that inhabited by their station wagon riding grandparents in the 1960s. Sprawl began consuming the exurban landscape at a pace far faster than the 1950s. Now residential areas were much further from the social spaces of the cities and devoid of public space. Many children grew up in an environment where everything had been privatized under the control or private ownership or an HOA. I grew up walking to the 7-11, but this generation was miles from anywhere along streets without sidewalks. Schools grew while the fertility of an aging population fell, putting school far beyond walkable distance for most children. Community youth programs: sports, scouting, 4H and others were scheduled destinations that parents transported children to and immediately whisked them away from the moment the adult planned (and thus validated) activity ended.
I grew up in the inner ring Southern Suburbs of Charleston, SC in the 1960s and 1970s. it was a five-block walk to the 7-11, Church was within a mile, a community pool was around the corner and the undeveloped woods covered hundreds of acres around us, open for exploring and adventure. I was exploring that landscape, blocks and sometimes over a mile from home at age 7. They put parents in Jail for allowing kids to do that today. A parent in Lexington, SC is facing felony charges for leaving her 9 year old child at a public part for two hours. As a teenager, I was luckier still and grew up at a house with a dock on a creek and a Sunfish Sailboat which I used to voyage about Charleston harbor, landing in remote areas and even camping overnight at the age of 13. It was one block the community club, where my scout troop met.
As a teen, I helped rebuild the community docks on Hobcaw Creek with older men of the community who had served in WWII. We helped prepare for the annual sailboat races. I participated in our City’s Bicentennial Events, including a day envisioning a better future for America called Town Hall ’76, the product of which would embarrass us today due to its clueless optimism. Racism would fade away. We would never blunder into another war like Vietnam. We would invent our way out of the energy crisis. Scandals like Watergate would be avoided. America would be better. Women, minorities, and the disabled would become fully respected members of the national community. In 1976, I was a member of the Youth Conservation Corps, working on recreational improvements on our national forest.
That was fifty years ago. When President Obama tried to build a national service corps, the Republicans fought it. Few young people in 2009 got to help build America.
Racism has survived and is now waging a dogged comeback using the internet we foolishly believed would make people smarter and more tolerant. Women have lost control of their reproductive lives. Home ownership is beyond the reach of many young people who, despite being passive consumers of the nation’s toxic political output, should be entitled to the material prosperity Nixon promised for conformity.
Young people haven’t been taught how to hold real meetings, use Robert’s rules of Order, or sustain their self-initiated programs to obtain progress and change. The High School Student Council my son was elected to never held structured meetings under student leadership, didn’t develop a budget and didn’t pass resolutions. It didn’t have a committee structure or produce reports. It never attempted to solicit, distill, and convey the aspirations of the students they represented. They served as a volunteer bank for fund raising events. To my credit or shame, my son’s very public resignation from his seat was apparently spectacular as it’s been reported to me by my peers.
However, if you set tents up in a park, you must learn governance very quickly. Mistakes like not having toilet access, the accumulation of trash or being unprepared to communicate with the media have an immediate impact. You don’t need days to assemble your peers for a meeting. You need minutes. Your meetings must work. I don’t think the wavy hands stuff Occupy did works as well as Roberts Rules, but it’s better than nothing. I know making things happen still requires people to sit in a room and commit, something you can’t really do online. Once the kids in the park are up against a crisis or two the markers of leadership and trust must emerge. They will either learn how to make things happen or their community will dissolve.
If their community does dissolve, the experience obtained by those ready to do better gets concentrated elsewhere rapidly. Things which might take years to happen in a suburban landscape, take days. With electronic communication, connecting these rapidly evolving community’s emerging leaders build power on a global scale.
Given that these protests are about Israel, this shouldn’t be surprising. After all the Israelites spent decades living in a tent city in the desert, struggling with issues of governance, leadership, and identity. The Jewish nation was born in a tent city, a protest the world from which they had made their exodus. Moses knew he had to force the development of a nation and a culture if his people were to survive. The walks of Jerico would have never fallen if the Jews who blew the horns hadn’t learned hard lessons and built a robust community in the desert.
I’m part of the Burning Man movement, which builds temporary communities around the world, the largest and best known of which is Black Rock City, population 80 thousand. We have our own local event. We have fun fire dancing and serving everyone tricked out oatmeal for breakfast, but hard lessons are learned every year about sanitation, communication and sharing rules and expectations. We must handle mental health issues, keep the generators running and leave no trace by Monday at Sundown. It’s always educational. You can see the polished vocabulary of social organization growing with each year at our little event. People with the talent to make these things work are identified and relied on. Between events, they study and refine their methods. It’s hard and takes focus. Community does not survive untended.
It appears there is an effort curve where the leadership learns how to buid community and struggles over the hump past the point where the community learns it’s obligation to create and nurture the shared expectations that make community sustainable. Community survival depends on leadership being able to push that process over the hump to the point where the community produces more energy than it consumes.
I also helped organize our Occupy Encampment here in 2011, which was only 99 hours. I was involved in the weeks long encampment at the SC State Capital. The progress towards functional community organization in Occupy never got as far as my Burning man experience, but they had a far shorter time and operated under lots of negative pressure. I got death threats for camping out in a city park with a permit. The police would show them to me during our daily legal issues conference. Most American still recognize the power of community and they resent what they don’t or can’t have.
stakes in America now are the highest seen in my lifetime. We haven’t been this close to the edge of national dissolution since 1931 or 1861. Most Americans live outside a community fabric now. They’re scared and angry. They’re retreating into ethnic and religious tribalism, a ridiculous strategy for a crowded, connected world of 8 billion people. Trump is certain to fail. The only real question is, will he take America down with him?
At Occupy I arranged for some of our local, historic Civil Rights leaders to meet with the Occupiers to discuss their experiences. The Occupiers were worried about losing their jobs and apartments. They asked if the Civil Rights people had been able to deal with that risk. The Civil Rights people said, no, if they got fired they just went out to live on the family farm with their relatives. They would help work the fields, hunt, and fish. Lack of shelter or food was inconceivable to them. They had the power of a historic community, its churches, schools, and extended families behind them.
It's remarkable to understand that the confidence of Martin Luther King’s followers was founded, in major part on the realization that thanks to agricultural stoop labor and access to the oyster bank, you could survive your activism.
Today’s young activists mostly lack that plan B. They’ll have to serve the economy to survive. Some are planning to go off grid, but that is harder than it sounds. Some of my burning man friends are already off grid, building organized alternative communities. They’ve told me I can come join them and they’ll welcome me with the traditional burning man greeting, “Welcome Home” when I arrive.
I appreciate their sentiment. I don’t know what the future holds. I am afraid however, that by the time I give up and retreat to their door, the greeting I get may not be, “Welcome Home” but “Do You have Food?”
I didn’t like Reagan or W. Bush, but it took Donald Trump to make me afraid of an election and distrustful of my neighbors and my country. The long journey back to a real local, regional, and national community will be hard and long. We can’t expect Manna from Heaven or Water from a Rock. I don’t know if America will get back to the promised land. The distance from the suburban strip mall may be too great. Too few may show up to join that Exodus.
However, if that journey is to be made, it will have to start with tiny communities of people who envision something better and move into cheap tents on public greens to assemble the host which might redeem the future. Nothing held in a corporate or government sponsored meeting room will accomplish that. It would be better, and far easier, if we could launch from the bandstand on a Town Square and use the toilets at the Grange Hall, but tents from Target will have to do.
And those tents and the little villages of dissent in which the resistance learns to be a community have to be defended. Like the Lord, who parted the sea and blocked Pharaoh’s way with fire, those of us in comfortable houses must lend our strength and support to those young wanderers on the beach to put fire in the sky and wind across the water.