Occutopia

BOSTON — OCTOBER 15, 2011. My name is Alex Pearlman. It’s been two weeks and two days since I plopped a sleeping bag and a biodegradable shopping bag full of clothes at Dewey Square. I was one of about 150 people who stayed there that first night, and I’ve since been a member of the media team of Occupy Boston, which today is part of a global initiative of tent city protests hell bent on change.

When I voted for President Obama in 2008, I was in college, and full of the kind of idealism that allowed me to hope things might actually get stirred up in my country’s political machine. I thought that by electing someone who preached to my issues, we might actually get out of the wars in the Middle East and West Asia, fix the national debt, hire teachers to raise the reading level of eighth graders above a 9-year-old’s comprehension, and make strides in the fight for immigrant and gay equality. I was wrong.

I spent the next year perplexed, hoping against hope that the change we were promised was just around the corner. I stood up for the president and implored those wiser minds around me to give him a chance.

Finally, I was forced to admit defeat. We entered two more proxy wars, in Pakistan and Yemen. Yesterday we invaded Uganda. Gay marriage was voted down in my home state of California, and although New Yorkers now enjoy human rights in this vein, few other Americans can claim the same. Immigrants are under fire now more than ever, and rampant xenophobia, once only a figment of my Holocaust-surviving grandmother’s stories, pulses through the nation.

I felt I needed to make a change. I told anyone who would listen at my Wikileaks-themed salon debates, my magazine’s office, my mother’s living room, that if someone in the U.S. didn’t wrap themselves in an American flag in front of the Capitol building and yell for change into a bullhorn by New Years Eve 2011, starting a mass revolt here, I would do it myself.

In December, 2010, a man in Tunis lit himself on fire and sparked a global uprising that spread from East to West in waves of democratic clamoring. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Greece, Libya, Italy, Spain, England, Israel, and finally, New York.

On September 17, 2011, I sat in my North End apartment and wept. I watched on a livestream as my American brothers and sisters finally took up arms of peaceful protest against this system that has raped our Republic and I cried. Finally, I saw a way for the wasted years of hope for change to be realized and I thought, “This is it.”

The occupation in Boston began a week and a half later.

We met at the gazebo in the Boston Common, all 300 of us who turned out to organize our own piece of the Occupy Wall Street idea, and we talked.

No one has ever seen a more productive or chaotic meeting of minds and ideas than this was. When 300 people want their voices heard at once, yet they stand and take turns with the People’s Mic, practicing a truly horizontal, leader-less system of democracy, it’s enough to overwhelm even the most talkative of radical organizers. It was truly beautiful, and it was in that moment I decided I was in – for the long haul.

Two more days of these off-site mass meetings took place, one at the Common, the other at E5, a community meeting place in the dodgiest part of Chinatown. Necessary things were agreed upon, like where we would camp (Dewey Square), who was in which group (there were eight original groups: Media, Medical, Legal, Logistics, Direct Action, Arts and Culture, Outreach, and Food), and what each group would be responsible for doing in the coming days.

On the Wednesday night before we took the square on Friday, the 30th, the media team met at one of our members’ Cambridge design studio on Prospect St. I realized that not only is reformation the best way to get know peoples’ best selves, but that the young people of this country are significantly more industrious than we’ve ever been given credit for. That night, we designed posters to distribute around the city, we set up the official website, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and wrote two press releases that would be ready to go on Friday morning.

Chowing down on 7-11 burritos, SunChips and Gatorade, bonds were formed and I realized that a revolution was beginning to take shape. But, this wasn’t what our parents fought like in the 1960s. This was a technology-driven mechanism standing on the backs of our mid-century forefathers. We’ve learned what worked and what didn’t back then; the lessons permeated even the worst of the public school districts. Civil disobedience is mobile and virtual now, as well as old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground work. But as we learned from Iran and Egypt, those two things need to work together to have a successful operation. From the justice-driven hive mind of Anonymous, we learned that a leader-less online mass could be just as powerful as 2,000 people marching on the State House. And we knew from our post-millennial experience that when everyone gets a gold star, meaning when everyone has something to do, no matter how small, everyone wins.

I had my hands on a number of different aspects of the project, and so did everyone else in the room – this was what consensus-based democracy looked like, and I loved it.

My college best friend and former roommate joined in as well, and as a political consultant, his PR-savvy was well received. There was a tech junkie and a graphic designer whose team of interns helped with visuals that night and never left. And my social media and new media knowledge lent itself to the creation of the Boston-based network of tweeters and status updaters that assisted the media team in spreading news. That night, the team of 15 people, which has since grown to about 40, showed me that I could start hoping again.

As we talked about what needed fixing in the political and financial realms of our government and economy, it was obvious to me that I was just one person of hundreds of thousands who had been having these kinds of ideas; who had a copy of the Bill of Rights framed on their living room wall; and who was sick and tired of attempting to convince acquaintances that the policies that govern us have limits and that the Constitution is a living document that waits on the gruesome mess of the floor of Capitol Hill to be changed.

I found myself in love, for the first time, at 5 a.m. on a rainy Thursday morning in Cambridge, at the thought of writing policy and the adrenaline of revolution, something I had avoided to save my stomach the nausea induced by the thought of participating in American bipartisan politics. Fuck the two-party system, we’re building a new one, I thought. And I skipped down the street to a friend’s cozy couch, only to wake up three hours later and go back to it.

Friday afternoon, I packed up an old camping backpack with the aforementioned sleeping bag and clothing parcel and walked along Atlantic Ave. from the North End to South Station, getting a few odd looks along the way. I was full of energy and as I approached the Greenway, tents began to come into view.

A march called Take Back the City put together by unions and community organizations against Bank of America and the foreclosure crisis demonstrated that day as well. The Vida Urbana/City Life/MassUniting action ended at 5:30 p.m., leaving close to 1,500 people in Dewey Square in front of the Federal Reserve Building.

Then, Occupy Boston officially got underway.