Friday, June 15, 2012

The "Occupy" Cult Becomes a Way of Life for the Lost

From Reuters:
(Reuters) - Seven months after Occupy Wall Street's eviction from Zuccotti Park, the round-the-clock encampment in lower Manhattan that was once the movement's center, one protester has created his own version of the communal living experiment in Brooklyn. 
The spacious apartment in Crown Heights where Austin Guest, a 31-year-old Harvard University graduate, lives with another seasoned protester is a far cry from the crowded, chaotic Zuccotti Park of last fall, where hundreds of protesters camped out each night.

Nevertheless, inspired by Zuccotti, with its free meals and free books, Guest said he and his friends are pursuing an Occupy-like experiment in mutual aid.

In the apartment, for example, the protesters follow a code of conduct designed to prevent one person from dominating a conversation. Guest, who majored in performance and media studies at Harvard, said he has had to "unlearn" the sometimes "impenetrable" rhetoric of the Ivy League.

"I was trained to speak in, like, five paragraphs at a time, with really clearly delineated, bulletproof arguments. And that kind of communication doesn't leave a lot of space. That's the point. It's impenetrable. And that's not how we talk in OWS," he said...
No, because unless you're talking in single syllable sound-bites, no one in OWS will understand you.

This exercise in "group living" sounds like nothing more than an update of the 60s' hippy-dippy communes, albeit in an urban setting.

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