Don’t be discouraged by low turnout.  The numbers will grow.  The cause is just!

I appreciate the sentiment animating the protest, but ultimately I see it as counterproductive.  Successful protest is all about context and numbers.  Sometimes the historical conditions surrounding a protest are so full of contradictions and antagonisms that a few people taking a brave stand can have a great effect.  I’d point to the desegregation of lunch counters in the American South as a prime example of this sort of successful protest.  Where historical context is less potent, but is still at least tending toward a progressive juncture, getting huge numbers into the streets can make up for less than perfect materio-social conditions.  The awakening of the heterosexual America to the threat of HIV/AIDS during the 1980s-1990s due to the efforts of dedicated activists from the Queer community comes to mind as an example.

Numbers–even the tens or hundreds of thousands–cannot, unfortunately, compensate for unfavorable historical context.  Take the enormous anti-war demonstrations that were held throughout America during the Bush presidency: Americans of conscience took to the streets time and time again to no avail.  Why?  Because there was no material basis to stop the war.  The American lifestyle (even that of the less fortunate among us) is lavish compared to how the vast majority of people on this planet live.  This lifestyle is our end of a devil’s bargain made with finance capital.  The American financial system is kept afloat through the wholesale plunder of the third world.  Sometimes this relationship of super-exploitation has to be maintained and reinforced with arms.  There was no foundational material basis to end Bush’s (now Obama’s) wars and thus flooding the streets and parks with bodies was for naught.

And so it will go with most of these “occupations” (Wall Street being a noteworthy exception due mainly to the context created by its location).  People will show up, attempt to communicate through protest a message that is diluted by the chosen tactic’s alienation from the issue purportedly confronted, and not much will happen.  Occupying Wall Street at least has the potential to draw attention to the misdeeds of the banking class and spark a discussion about the historical development of American capitalism from something productive (albeit fraught with inequities) into something irredeemably vampiric.  The occupation of a park in the Inner Harbor, on the other hand, is a protest without context (what, exactly, is being protested and how does this scrap of land relate to it?) and will likely be lacking in numbers as a result.  All it will do is waste the youthful energy of would-be activists and give reactionaries something to laugh at in the glaringly out of place encampment of Kids Who Dress Funny.

My unsolicited and probably unwelcome advice to the Occupiers: go home.  Go home and have more meetings about just what it is you’re trying to fight and how to best draw attention and support to your struggle.  Baltimore has dramatic problems with homelessness, building abandonment, drug addiction, imprisonment, misguided “War on Drugs” (read: “War on Youth of Color”) policies, police brutality, predatory lending, education inequality, etc, etc, ad nauseam.  Pick one issue (or a couple of closely related issues) and stage actions that very clearly relate to it.  Want to call attention to how predatory lending during the mortgage boom ultimately wreaked havoc on Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods?  Find a homeowner who’s trying to refuse eviction and help her organize a mass occupation of her house when the Sheriff’s deputies come knocking.  Want to take on building abandonment and homelessness?  Start rehabbing an abandoned without official permission (but with steps taken to secure neighborhood support and involvement) and then go public with it.  Show people that building reclamation doesn’t have to be about shooting galleries, suburban summer squatters, and the other stereotypes.  Want to take on the bevvy of criminal justice issues tied to racism and the War on Drugs?  Start a Copwatch chapter, maybe occupy the space in front of Central Booking (though this may be a case of dinner serving itself to the diners), network with the support groups that already exist within the Black community that are taking on issues of prisoners’ rights, reintegrating convicts, and so forth.  The Occupiers appear to be almost entirely white and mostly young.  Instead of creating or joining yet another futile protest movement led and initiated by People Like You, get together with the poor and oppressed right next door and figure out how to put your energy and privilege at their disposal.

Minimal movement goals should be:

1) Break up the fed and any banks that are too big to fail.
2) Lock the revolving door of money buying Power in DC

get a job you hippies

I think this is very admirable and I am pleased that Baltimore contains such passionate people. I am sure this is a dumb question but what does the 99 percent thing mean?  They’re 99 percent of what? I don’t understand what that part means, can anyone explain?