Soon after finishing the declaration, the early organizers started to have a problem: their solutions were to be accessible to everyone, but so was their protest. The crowds at those early meetings came in response to messages broadcast over a narrow channel, the Adbusters list. They were committed to a tangible goal, with an immediate deadline. But in early October, as the national media seized on the Zuccotti Park story, the rest of the ninety-nine per cent started showing up. The G.A. had to tackle three new challenges simultaneously: holding ground; managing a semi-permanent village; and guiding a much larger and more cacophonous political conversation. All this had to be done with almost no heat, running water, or electricity.
Consensus—the agreed-upon method of decision-making—wasn’t easy among hundreds of self-identified ninety-nine-per-centers, whose politics ranged from “Daily Show” liberalism to insurrectionary anarchism. Because of the ground rules determined by the people sitting on the cobblestones in August, no decision could be made without giving everyone in attendance the chance to cross his or her arms and bring the meeting to a halt. According to the G.A.’s rules, a nine-tenths vote could override a block, but only after each block had explained his or her objections and the facilitators had responded. The least reasonable people often got the most time to speak.
Other people approached the facilitators. A group of herbalists wanted fifteen hundred dollars to make medicines. Someone wanted to present “Native American peace principles” derived from the Iroquois Confederacy. Someone else had a facilitation accountability model, a spreadsheet for evaluating the facilitators. A representative from an N.Y.U. student group asked the G.A. to formally endorse Occupy Oakland’s Day of Action. He was informed that such an endorsement had already been made. A few minutes later, everyone began speaking at once. “Whoa!” a facilitator cried. “Let’s take a breath and get centered. This is a valid conversation, but this is not the right venue to have it.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz#ixzz2Ka7yXe4p
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