Archive for the ‘Solutions’ Category
99 Percent Spring in East Harlem
VOCAL and Community Voices Heard held a training for the 99 Percent Spring at the Children’s Aid Society on 101st Street. By my count, 100+ people gathered in CAS’s auditorium. Many were members of established groups. Others found out through MoveOn.org.
A VOCAL member speaks at the 99 Percent Spring training at the Children's Aid Society, April 14, 2012
Spring kicked off with a letter released in February, signed by a who’s who of prominent progressives, union leaders, and community organizers. Its goals:
- Tell the story of our economy: how we got here, who’s responsible, what a different future could look like, and what we can do about it
- Learn the history of nonviolent direct action, and
- Get into action on our own campaigns to win change.
And that’s what I saw and heard: HIV/AIDS campaigners, advocates for domestic workers, immigrants, and low-income folks (many of whom ARE low-income folks), plus the unaffiliated of all races, ages, and orientations gathered to take the next Occupy Wall Street–inspired step.
Charles Young at Counterpunch, a left publication, calls 99 Percent Spring a “front group” for MoveOn and a Trojan horse for the Democratic Party. He claims that both aim to coopt and neuter the movement, suck all the radicalism of out it.
Young slams the effort based on an event he attended at the Goddard Riverside Community Center on the “Upper Left Side” of Manhattan.
“Inside the hall, it looked like an alumni reunion for the 1966 Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade. Almost all the 150 or so people were 55–80 years old. The ones I talked to expressed curiosity about Occupy Wall Street and enthusiasm about ‘nonviolent direct action’ but didn’t have the knees or the ears for full participation in OWS activities in the financial district,” he writes. Just a few weeks ago I attended a reading by author Fred Jerome at Goddard Riverside attended by several dozen people. At 47 years old, I was probably the youngest person in the room. Journalist Young might have considered that Goddard serves a heck of a lot of seniors, and they turn out, regardless of the event.
Will genuine direct action for social and economic justice grow out of the 99 Percent Spring? The proof will be on the streets. My bet is, after a year spent following VOCAL with camera and pen—witnessing arrests of its members at OWS demonstrations and its in-your-face protests against drug company execs—at least some of these Spring trainees will deliver.
Members of Adhikaar hold up a sketch of a model community @ 99 Percent Spring Training, April, 14, 2012
They are the 90%!
With economic, political, social, and you-name-it turmoil swirling around the globe, it’s inspiring to see concrete solutions to massive global problems.
The fixes on display at the United Nations’ exhibition Design with the Other 90%: CITIES are modest, but their implications are huge: a bicycle-powered cell phone charger; barge-like floating schools for flood-plagued Bangladesh; sturdy, locally sourced materials that slum dwellers use to build shelters, etc. These are relatively inexpensive things that palpably change the lives of the 90 percent of the world’s population for whom commodities aren’t designed.
This is the second in an ongoing series of exhibitions. The first one was called Design for the Other 90%. The with in this one is real: The products on display are the result of collaborations between local folks in poor urban communities and international designers. These are people who are taking care of business.
Twenty-plus years ago, my friend Apichart dragged me away from the comforts of Shanti Lodge, his Bangkok guesthouse, for a cruise deep into the klongs (canals) and oil-slick tributaries of the Chao Phraya River. Our longtail boat didn’t tear ass like James Bond’s in The Man With the Golden Gun; it chugged slowly enough for me to see the ramshackle stilt houses and trash bobbing up and down at the shoreline. Which was Apichart’s point: Bangkok is more—and less—than backpacker haven Khao San Road, salacious Patpong, and cheap paad Thai. It is also pollution and poverty. But also progress: Design highlights the Bang Bua Canal Community Upgrade, a project initiated by residents that has rehabbed homes and untrashed the water along an eight-mile stretch of the canal, which is home to 12 informal communities with 3,400 residents.
Bike-powered cell phone charger
Model of Medellín's Metrocable and Northeast Integral Urban Project
Useful ideas and potential inspiration, perhaps, for Occupiers around the country speaking and demonstrating on behalf of the 99% here in the US.
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES is at the United Nations Visitors Center through January 9, 2012. Head over if you’re hankering for a shot of hope.
Visitor photographs Fredrik Reuterswärd's sculpture Non-Violence
