Not the city. Not the police. Not FEMA. Not even the Red Cross. No, it's OWS, delivering the organizational skills and labor to make it happen. Here's Kouril:
OWS did what they do best, rallied compassionate people, started cooking meals and gave them away, just like at Liberty Plaza (it’s hard to get me to call it Zuccotti Park). They organized blankets and flashlights and charging stations (including the Green Peace solar truck and those cool Gilligan’s Island bicycle generators), just as they did at Liberty Plaza. They knocked on doors to ask the stranded residents what they needed. They sent out tweets for “needs of the occupiers” and supporters from all over the world sent supplies, just like at Liberty Plaza. They even improved on that with an Occupy Sandy “wedding registry” on Amazon that helps do[n]ors to ship supplies quickly and easily. Genius!But you need to read the whole post to capture the flavor of just how effectively this large, amorphous, leaderless organization (can one call it an organization?) has succeeded where established recovery channels have failed. Somebody needs to tell the world about this. But our media, instead, delivers Mayor Bloomberg's press conferences to an audience of people whose electricity is on. Ah, irony!
These are the people I sent my donation to because they were already delivering assistance while the 'big guys' were still 'coordinating a response'.
ReplyDeleteThis picture sort of sums up the situation.
I read about that pic, Bryan, and I'm glad to see it confirmed. The heartening thing about this is that Occupy seems to have skills no one would have expected of a group so decentralized... no one, that is, except someone who had seen it work. The best part is that Bloomberg's thugs spent last spring and summer attempting to intimidate presumably these same people by brute force (and I do mean "brute"), and here they are not merely turning the other cheek, but providing better recovery services than Bloomberg and the feral guvmint put together. My sense of irony is well-satisfied!
DeleteThank you for this great post, for it demonstrates that beneath the bullshit of the lesser evil, there is truly hope in a groundswell of humanity.
ReplyDeletekarmanot, the one time I had an opportunity to talk to the local Occupy folks here, they all emphasized that their messages, loosely formulated as they may be, have utterly nothing to do with partisan politics. Here in NYC is a demonstration of the truth of that. One can hardly imagine many of their members voting for Rmoney, but they were out there helping quite possibly many of the people who did, and offering the help in a disciplined way that seems difficult in government these days, quite possibly because of the partisan divide.
DeleteDon't worry, I'm not about to go all "bipartisan" on you... ain't gonna happen!