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Okay, so, as you may or may not know, I've been volunteering as a medic at Occupy Boston a few days a week for the past 2-3 weeks. I will state up-front that I agree with the movement's goals, I feel it's important, and supporting it by volunteering is something I would very much like to continue doing. I also am pretty inarticulate and bad at arguing to support my views. I don't really like getting into debates because it always ends with me sort of waving my arms ineffectually and going "ARGH I haven't been saying what I mean to say, I don't know how I can get this across, I feel really dumb and am probably wrong anyway!". If you want to respond with "here is a list of reasons why the Occupy movement is ill-advised and stupid" or anything along those lines, you certainly can do that and I won't flip out or ~judge you~ or stop being friends with you. I just also probably won't respond.
I will also state that in the following post I am talking only about Occupy Boston, because that's the only branch of the movement that I have any firsthand experience with. For all the rest, I just know what I've gotten from blogs and news media, and I don't have anything really unique to say.
That being said! There are a few aspects of the... atmosphere, I guess, at Occupy Boston that really get to me, and I am frustrated, so now I am going to vent.
1. Smoking
I'm not the kind of person who gets on their high horse about smoking. If you're an adult and you know what you're doing you can do whatever the fuck you want with your own body, that's your prerogative. But the thing is that I have asthma, and when I'm around cigarette smoke I kind of can't breathe. And much of the population of Occupy Boston smokes all the time. More to the point, they smoke everywhere. There are no designated areas or anything, and that makes it really, really hard to avoid. I try to stand upwind of smokers and, failing that, politely explain my condition and ask if they could perhaps go somewhere else for a few minutes. But the sheer volume of people who are smoking at any given moment in any given part of the camp means that it's not possible to avoid inhaling smoke altogether, and while I have yet to have a full-on attack, it has, a couple of times, gotten to the point where I can feel my throat starting to close up. I would really love if there were some kind of designated smoking area, or failing that, at least some designated non-smoking areas, but I have the feeling that if that were implemented, people would go "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT YOU ARE TAKING AWAY MY FREEDOMS!" About which more later.
I do feel like a bit of an entitled jerk for complaining about all this ("WHY CAN'T THE WORLD REARRANGE ITSELF TO CATER TO MY HEALTH PROBLEMS?!"), but... eh. This is my LJ and I'm ranting and it bothers me.
2. Creepy Guys
There are unfortunately a lot of creepy guys hanging around Occupy Boston. They're not a majority, by any means, but there are more of them than there should be. A friend of mine had a really awful and frightening experience there, and while I have so far been fortunate enough not to encounter anything on that level, I have definitely been made to feel unsafe a few times. Not a lot of times, only really twice, but still. And while in retrospect "Will you give me a stem cell so I can have you recreated in a lab?" is a fairly hilarious pick-up line in a "what the fuck even" way, it is not that amusing in the moment when the guy is standing too close and he won't stop talking to you and you are desperately trying to ignore him and hoping that he will go away. I think part of the problem here is that Creepy Guys will take advantage of the fact that on-duty medics are a sort of captive audience — being on-call, as it were, in case of emergencies, I can't very well say "UM THAT'S NICE OKAY BYE" and flee. The best I can do is go "um, sir, I am on duty and I have shit to do, please leave." Which is fine if they listen to you, but.
Occupy Boston does try to be self-policing about this stuff. Security and Direct Action, are both there to be called on when someone is making things uncomfortable, and in my experience they have been helpful and not at all dismissive or victim-blaming. But first of all, in the moment it's really hard for me, personally, to think about shouting for security, because when cornered, I freeze up. I have this instinct where I go "Maybe if I stand really still and don't say anything, they won't see me! Like dinosaurs!" Which is in fact less effective than calling security — less effective, even, than firmly asking them to leave. But I'm not usually thinking rationally about this stuff. And second of all, whenever someone does get kicked out for inappropriate behavior of any kind, you get a bunch of people going "Now you're being just like The Man and not allowing everyone's voices to be heard!!!" About which more later.
(And the really terrible thing is that every time this happens, not just at Occupy Boston but in my life in general, my kneejerk reaction is "Why me? I'm unattractive and dress in a manner which covers as much skin as possible!" as opposed to "Man those guys are douchebags who should not be doing this to any one at all ever." But that, I think, is a whole different post which I may or may not ever make.)
3. Geek Social Fallacy #1
This, really, is the underlying problem, whence spring the other problems I complained about above. And also probably a number of other problems with the Occupy movement that I haven't talked about because they don't bother me as much personally.
Most of the Occupiers are probably not geeks in the usual sense of the word. But the rhetoric of Ostracisers Are Evil applies quite well here if for "jocks" you read "The Man". Excluding people is what The Man does; we are standing against The Man; ergo, we cannot kick anybody out or even ask them to stop unpleasant behavior because then we will be no better than The Man.
I understand that a lot of people at Occupy Boston have been marginalized in some way. I have too, although I certainly have it better than many people do and am probably one of the more privileged people around. I am all for making sure that Occupy Boston is as inclusive as possible, is a comfortable environment for as many people as possible, takes into account the needs of as many people as possible. But sometimes all of those things are best served by not letting individual douchebags run wild. I am in favor of having standards of behavior and enforcing them. You can't just let people do whatever they want all the time if it infringes on the comfort and safety of others (blah blah social contract, blah blah your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, I'm sure people have heard all this before and don't need me to reiterate it, and anyway it's three in the morning and I can't). It makes all those people unhappy, and it makes the movement as a whole look bad.
I will say that Security and Direct Action don't seem to have issues telling people to leave or to cut shit out when it's bothering people or is against the rules (we do have rules). And there are a number of people around who aren't in those positions who are still willing to tell people "hey, what you're doing is not an okay thing". But there is also a very vocal group of people (often young, often male) who, as I said, get very angry whenever someone is told to leave or to stop a certain behavior, and in between those two extremes there are a lot of people who sit back and let bad behavior happem in the name of inclusivity.
... and if anyone bothered reading all that, they're probably wondering why I still go down there at all. There are certainly things I like about Occupy Boston! I just... don't particularly need an outlet to express those things. Whereas I do need an outlet to complain about things that are minor and selfish (like smoking) or things that are big issues that I would have no idea how to broach within Occupy Boston itself (like the unwillingness to exclude anyone from anything). So that's where this comes from.
I will also state that in the following post I am talking only about Occupy Boston, because that's the only branch of the movement that I have any firsthand experience with. For all the rest, I just know what I've gotten from blogs and news media, and I don't have anything really unique to say.
That being said! There are a few aspects of the... atmosphere, I guess, at Occupy Boston that really get to me, and I am frustrated, so now I am going to vent.
1. Smoking
I'm not the kind of person who gets on their high horse about smoking. If you're an adult and you know what you're doing you can do whatever the fuck you want with your own body, that's your prerogative. But the thing is that I have asthma, and when I'm around cigarette smoke I kind of can't breathe. And much of the population of Occupy Boston smokes all the time. More to the point, they smoke everywhere. There are no designated areas or anything, and that makes it really, really hard to avoid. I try to stand upwind of smokers and, failing that, politely explain my condition and ask if they could perhaps go somewhere else for a few minutes. But the sheer volume of people who are smoking at any given moment in any given part of the camp means that it's not possible to avoid inhaling smoke altogether, and while I have yet to have a full-on attack, it has, a couple of times, gotten to the point where I can feel my throat starting to close up. I would really love if there were some kind of designated smoking area, or failing that, at least some designated non-smoking areas, but I have the feeling that if that were implemented, people would go "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT YOU ARE TAKING AWAY MY FREEDOMS!" About which more later.
I do feel like a bit of an entitled jerk for complaining about all this ("WHY CAN'T THE WORLD REARRANGE ITSELF TO CATER TO MY HEALTH PROBLEMS?!"), but... eh. This is my LJ and I'm ranting and it bothers me.
2. Creepy Guys
There are unfortunately a lot of creepy guys hanging around Occupy Boston. They're not a majority, by any means, but there are more of them than there should be. A friend of mine had a really awful and frightening experience there, and while I have so far been fortunate enough not to encounter anything on that level, I have definitely been made to feel unsafe a few times. Not a lot of times, only really twice, but still. And while in retrospect "Will you give me a stem cell so I can have you recreated in a lab?" is a fairly hilarious pick-up line in a "what the fuck even" way, it is not that amusing in the moment when the guy is standing too close and he won't stop talking to you and you are desperately trying to ignore him and hoping that he will go away. I think part of the problem here is that Creepy Guys will take advantage of the fact that on-duty medics are a sort of captive audience — being on-call, as it were, in case of emergencies, I can't very well say "UM THAT'S NICE OKAY BYE" and flee. The best I can do is go "um, sir, I am on duty and I have shit to do, please leave." Which is fine if they listen to you, but.
Occupy Boston does try to be self-policing about this stuff. Security and Direct Action, are both there to be called on when someone is making things uncomfortable, and in my experience they have been helpful and not at all dismissive or victim-blaming. But first of all, in the moment it's really hard for me, personally, to think about shouting for security, because when cornered, I freeze up. I have this instinct where I go "Maybe if I stand really still and don't say anything, they won't see me! Like dinosaurs!" Which is in fact less effective than calling security — less effective, even, than firmly asking them to leave. But I'm not usually thinking rationally about this stuff. And second of all, whenever someone does get kicked out for inappropriate behavior of any kind, you get a bunch of people going "Now you're being just like The Man and not allowing everyone's voices to be heard!!!" About which more later.
(And the really terrible thing is that every time this happens, not just at Occupy Boston but in my life in general, my kneejerk reaction is "Why me? I'm unattractive and dress in a manner which covers as much skin as possible!" as opposed to "Man those guys are douchebags who should not be doing this to any one at all ever." But that, I think, is a whole different post which I may or may not ever make.)
3. Geek Social Fallacy #1
This, really, is the underlying problem, whence spring the other problems I complained about above. And also probably a number of other problems with the Occupy movement that I haven't talked about because they don't bother me as much personally.
Most of the Occupiers are probably not geeks in the usual sense of the word. But the rhetoric of Ostracisers Are Evil applies quite well here if for "jocks" you read "The Man". Excluding people is what The Man does; we are standing against The Man; ergo, we cannot kick anybody out or even ask them to stop unpleasant behavior because then we will be no better than The Man.
I understand that a lot of people at Occupy Boston have been marginalized in some way. I have too, although I certainly have it better than many people do and am probably one of the more privileged people around. I am all for making sure that Occupy Boston is as inclusive as possible, is a comfortable environment for as many people as possible, takes into account the needs of as many people as possible. But sometimes all of those things are best served by not letting individual douchebags run wild. I am in favor of having standards of behavior and enforcing them. You can't just let people do whatever they want all the time if it infringes on the comfort and safety of others (blah blah social contract, blah blah your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, I'm sure people have heard all this before and don't need me to reiterate it, and anyway it's three in the morning and I can't). It makes all those people unhappy, and it makes the movement as a whole look bad.
I will say that Security and Direct Action don't seem to have issues telling people to leave or to cut shit out when it's bothering people or is against the rules (we do have rules). And there are a number of people around who aren't in those positions who are still willing to tell people "hey, what you're doing is not an okay thing". But there is also a very vocal group of people (often young, often male) who, as I said, get very angry whenever someone is told to leave or to stop a certain behavior, and in between those two extremes there are a lot of people who sit back and let bad behavior happem in the name of inclusivity.
... and if anyone bothered reading all that, they're probably wondering why I still go down there at all. There are certainly things I like about Occupy Boston! I just... don't particularly need an outlet to express those things. Whereas I do need an outlet to complain about things that are minor and selfish (like smoking) or things that are big issues that I would have no idea how to broach within Occupy Boston itself (like the unwillingness to exclude anyone from anything). So that's where this comes from.