Globe Gift: Occupy is History

It isn't, but the corporate media sure is acting like it.

"Museums begin collecting Occupy Wall Street mementos" Associated Press / December 25, 2011 

It may be only a few months old, but Occupy Wall Street is already collectible. More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly archiving materials produced by the Occupy movement.

--NOMORE--"

Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera.

The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month.

The lavish attention poured on the liberal-leaning movement has not gone unnoticed by conservatives.
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, blogged sarcastically under its “Corruption Chronicles” about the choice by the Smithsonian to document Occupy.

The Smithsonian said its American history collection also now includes materials related to the massive tea party rally against health care reform in March 2010 and materials from the American Conservative Union’s Washington, D.C., conference in February.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launched OccupyArchive.org in mid-October on a hunch that it could become historically important. So far, it has about 2,500 items in its online database, including compressed files of entire Occupy websites from around the country and hundreds of images scraped from photo-sharing site Flickr.

To keep established institutions from shaping the movement’s short history, protesters have formed their own archive group, stashing away hundreds of cardboard signs, posters, fliers, buttons, periodicals, documents and banner....

Paragraphs that were cut from my printed pos.

Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York are planning to celebrate Christmas with a day of food, music, and political discussion in Zuccotti Park. The holiday will be the 100th day since the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in lower Manhattan on Sept. 17.  

Gee, why would the newspaper want to omit or censor that?

Organizers said they would hold a midnight prayer service early this morning, then serve breakfast. At noon they will read a 1967 speech by Martin Luther King opposing the Vietnam War. That will be followed by a potluck supper and several hours of poetry, storytelling, and music.

What didn't make print in my Globe:

Esther Brumberg, senior curator of collections for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, said the museum had approached “Occupy Judaism” co-organizer Daniel Sieradski about a poster he had done for a Yom Kippur prayer service for protesters at Zuccotti Park that drew hundreds of people. The poster shows the silhouetted fiddler image from the Jewish musical “Fiddler on the Roof” astride the Wall Street bull.

Sieradski said it made sense that his poster should end up in the museum’s permanent collection.

“What I think is great is that they are actually looking to build their collection around contemporary American Jewish history and maybe broaden what their offerings are to the public so that they can tell a more complete story,” he said.

While there are no immediate plans to use the poster in an exhibition, Brumberg called it “just one of a number of instances of Jewish activism” that they are interested in and are trying to collect....

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Also see: Sunday Globe Special: Saying Goodbye to Occupy

History is always haunted:

"Homeless allies’ plight haunts Occupy protesters" December 20, 2011|By Martine Powers

For many of those who spent their nights at the Occupy Boston encampment, Dewey Square was not just a meeting place - it was a home.

In the nearly two weeks since Mayor Thomas M. Menino ordered the closing of the Financial District camp, the movement has scrambled to find housing for some of its most vulnerable members.

And for many involved in Occupy Boston, the challenge of finding shelter for those people every night has opened a window onto the vast complexity of homelessness, framed by substance abuse, mental health issues, and economic forces....  

Not really. Most of it is banks throwing people out of homes after job loss.

From the start, the Occupy Boston movement embraced the city’s homeless, who made up about half of the roughly 100 overnight residents at the camp. To many protesters, they served as the boldest symbol of the government’s failure to care for all its citizens.

As the camp matured, members even incorporated new terminology: Transient members were referred to as “houseless’’ instead of “homeless’’ because, of course, their home was the Occupy Boston site.

When Menino ordered the camp’s eviction, vans from the Pine Street Inn and the Boston Public Health Commission arrived to pick up homeless people who planned to leave. But Barbara Trevisan, a Pine Street spokeswoman, said only a few took up the offer....

It is hard to know where the rest went. Many melted back onto the streets....

Anna Aizman, an Occupy Boston member, said homeless members of the Occupy camp are frustrated the movement has not devised a permanent solution.

“There’s a lot of anger, like, ‘How can you not take care of this?’ ’’ Aizman said. “The truth is, we don’t know how to take care of it.’’  

I'm wondering WHY it is OCCUPY'S RESPONSIBILITY when they HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH CREATING the PROBLEM?

Some Occupy Boston members have been taken in by other members of the movement - like 36-year-old Cherie King, who has been living in Somerville with another protester who has nine housemates. She is grateful, she said.

But at the harried end of a lengthy general assembly meeting Thursday, King brought up a proposal to use Occupy Boston funds to pay for MBTA monthly passes for protesters who do not have jobs or homes. She became frustrated when some questioned the specifics of her idea.

“I see selfishness within this movement when it comes to people who have no income and no home,’’ King said.

After the meeting, she explained her indictment. It is not that protesters do not care about the plight of the homeless, she said. But she is afraid that homelessness is getting lost among myriad other issues pressing the movement.

“Some really good activists might get lost if we don’t figure out a permanent place for them,’’ King said.

In the same way Occupy Boston has had to deal with a movement without a camp, city officials have had to respond to the scattering of the homeless. Jim Greene, Boston’s chief administrator on homelessness, said the city is working to ensure that those who took up residence at Dewey Square know what resources are available....   

Yeah, the city is doing all they can.

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The Globe is pretty close to being history with me.