A couple of weeks ago, I came across a story in The Nation that I had trouble reading. It wasn't offensive, or badly written, but the first paragraph made me jump around the story to pull out specific bits, to try and find out what it was getting at.

The article kicked off with a story about a man named Joe who was taking part in Occupy Wall Street.

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. ... [E]ven though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”

After reading that, I just couldn't tell where the story was going. This was a supportive piece, right? Or were they making fun of a man who thought puppetry was his road to financial security? Could a person who spiked a job and put all his chips on the puppet arts be a victim of anything more than his own decision? Surely you can't lay the blame on somebody who has gambled foolishly and lost on Wall Street bankers any more than Joe should carry the burden of Wall Street bankers that gambled foolishly and lost. What the heck is this thing about?

The protestors have been widely criticized for not having a coherent message. Well, the fact is they're not really a lobby group so that's probably not the point. But many of the issues they are raising are worth serious discussion. That means the way they go about addressing these issues is worth discussing, too.

The Occupy protests had their genesis in the mind of Kalle Lasn, the editor of the anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, who has said "one of the most power things of all is aesthetics."

A recent article in the New Yorker describes the original idea behind Occupy Wall Street:

... in early June, the art department [at Adbusters] designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the “Charging Bull” sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: “the juxtaposition of the capitalist dynamism of the bull,” he remembers, “with the Zen stillness of the ballerina.” In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality—Adbusters’ signature. “What is our one demand?” the poster asked. “Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent.”

All of this is to say that the branding of Occupy protests have always been part of the consideration.

For the people who are out in the streets, or camping in parks around the world, it's worth thinking about how to get more people involved, and how to reach out to various groups that might be able to help, and might want to help: political parties, interest groups, the media, the soccer moms and NASCAR dads. Are they going to respond to street protests? Are they into urban camping?

Right now, a lot of what you see in the parks are attempts at a different way of doing politics.

The New Yorker article describes how things are run in Zuccoti Park, site of the Occupy Wall Street protest:

The anarchists immediately agreed to use “horizontal” organizing methods, according to which meetings are known as general assemblies and participants make decisions by consensus and give continuous feedback through hand gestures. Moving one’s fingers in an undulating motion, palm out, pointing up, means approval of what’s being said. Palm in, pointing down, means disapproval. Crossed arms signals a “block,” a serious objection that must be heard. Some participants knew this style of meeting from left-wing traditions stretching back to the civil-rights movement and earlier.

It's an interesting way of having a meeting I guess, but that sort of thing is certainly not for me. And I will never see drum circles as a good use of time, nor blocking traffic and street cars as an effective way to get people to take notice of your message. It's a great way to thoroughly annoy people and get them irritated by your protest. Trying to squat on Queen Street West to distribute food seems kind of random to me. It would be a loss to the movement is these actions became a barrier to participation in the discussion, and if the brand turned sympathetic people off.

So the protestors are talking about the 99 per cent of people who aren't making the lion share of the money. They're talking about the influence of money in politics. But they aren't the voice of all people who are concerned about these issues. The best case scenario is the other people who are interested stay interested, and get active in conventional and creative ways. The "horizontal" organization the protestors are using doesn't have to stop at the boundaries of a tent-filled park. I'm very curious to see whether or not they will. Perhaps this holiday season, we'll see students who took part chewing over these issues with their parents as they chew over a roast turkey.

In Toronto, the protestors have moved out of the park for good. If the conversation moves out of the park, and if it sustains, then something really incredible will have happened.