Compost Capitalism: Queer in the yurt

While in London yesterday I ventured past St Paul's Cathedral, site of this citys' show-of-support camp-out.

An entry to the tent city.  Behind me is a busy street, a row of port-a-potties and a police surveillance van.

The flat light of a white cloud day gives every object the same importance. Higher humidity intensifies smells. Neither St Paul's nor the occupy (verb: to take, seize, hold, inhabit) tent city looked its best.

Compost capitalism

The tent city is full of characters and of people wearing black North Face coats holding expensive cameras all to say I AM A PHOTOJOURNALIST. The day, the light, the smell did not lends itself to such sentimentality to me so I looked for other things.   Occupy as Art has been recorded by others.

The fliers on the walls illustrate the movement's focus.

I too do not want people to die in custody or be unjustly persecuted, though do not know what "SUS" is.
 I do like the riff on high school exams found in yellow to the right.  

Steps you can do.

More ways to help from home. 

Occupy humor: There's sex too!...

...and dancing.  Note father in foreground with stroller child.  More about him below.

The tent city has a comprehensive first aid station, a meditation tent,

a library and a uni.

The organization.

Finance and media meet in Starbucks; welfare and environment in Ye Old Pub; Queer in the yurt.

I sound cynical and tired, I know.  Walking around here I could only think of Bill Keller's NYT piece where he examined his occupying countrymen by comparing this popular protest to ones in India (no India is not America but both countries were born of push-back from the same Empire, and here I was in the heart of said Empire.....thus biased I was from the beginning, though, please note, it was a New York Times bias.)

Read it. Blogger now gives me a check-box option to have the link open in a new window automatically and remembers my preferences so no longer do I have to remember to edit the html.   Woo hoo.

So: powerpoint, not placards. Change from within, attention to detail, repeal that law, end those subsidies, embrace the capitalist work-around.   Being leaderless means for the occupy movement that nothing gets done.  Anyone who works on a team without an empowered leader or a clearly articulated goal knows this. I am reading the Steve Jobs biography.  Each chapter illustrates that s*#t does not just happen, a leader makes it happen.

This journey needs the focus of a destination.

The ernest father explaining why the dancing and the music, the tents and the posters,  to his young son (see above) conveyed a you-are-witnessing-something-historic breathlessness to his pint-sized future world leader.  My hope is that the tot grows to understand that change requires the unglamorous hard and risky work of leadership, organization and government and is far, far more than just showing up.

Onwards.