So as I was reheating my lunch, my coworker stood on the balcony outside the break room, which affords a pretty amazing view of Civic Center Park. She poked her head into the breakroom, as I stirred my soup. “They’re coming, the Occupy Denver people!”
Sure enough, a small line of people were moving from the camp toward our administrative building. They blocked traffic and the cop cars that had been sitting silently around the park began to mobilize. This isn’t going to end well, I thought. And I’m sure it won’t. As of 2 pm today, mark my words: Someone is about to do something stupid and it will be labeled as part of these “Occupy” shenanigans those crazy kids are talking about.
It’s time to stop this. Maybe the people you’ve heard about who have defecated on the sidewalk or picked fights with cops were plants. Do you think it matters? Of course it doesn’t. Does it still matter that the WMDs were a lie? No, it never mattered. The truth about what happens is not nearly as important as the way it characterized a moment. And right now, Occupy is letting what could have been the most important populist moment in our nation’s history since VietNam become branded in the dumbest way possible, by the dumbest people involved. But, let’s face it, Occupiers have been going about this the wrong way since day 1. I’ve only been a PR student for four months and I see this.
First. Camping. What does camping accomplish? Besides violating pretty well-known laws regarding the use of public spaces, the only thing camping proves is that you are so entrenched in a culture of privilege that you have purchased equipment for the “recreation” purpose of sleeping outdoors rather than viewing it as a possible worst case scenario. I’m not sure who first decided that camping was the rhetorical approach the Occupy movement needed to take here, but they screwed up. The only thing the camping idea created is a frame of lawlessness (not following park rules), and presupposes that the people involved in the protest either don’t or don’t have to work (and can take a week off to camp in a park). Great start, good job.
Second: the message. Yes, the media has distorted, ignored, oversimplified and dumbed-down the Occupy message. Guess what? They do that. They always do that. But you can manipulate the media to your advantage, too. The Occupiers needed a clean, short easy-to-distribute, press-release style manifesto from day one. It needed to make its way into the hands of large numbers of press professionals, at the local level. Not a month later, casually thrown onto the blog like so much half-assed afterthought, not after malcontents and idiots started carrying signs about anarchy and “distributing wealth evenly” that had nothing to do with what they really were trying to accomplish. Not only was the message unclear, but it was unclear enough that even protesters started bastardizing it. The thing is, if you are going to truly affect change (or build a brand, which, isn’t that really what you’re doing here?), you must control your message. You must make sure it is well-articulated and kept strong, and that other messages don’t start to dilute the original spirit. And you can’t control a message that comes out halfway into the movement.
Third: the crowd. What started here as a comment on Capitalism Gone Wild has been diluted by basement-dwellers and mental cases carrying anarchy pamphlets and whacked-out plans to destroy our fundamental economic system (rhetorically destroy and, you know, destroy with actual bombs and stuff). Obviously, a message that a.) speaks truth to power and b.) takes actual, tangible action and protest to the doorsteps of people in power is going to attract some weirdos. The Tea Party may have had some good points about restructuring government (let’s face it, they actually did, but then, the Koch brothers… well, you know the end of that story). But whose pictures end up in the paper? People with signs photoshopped so Obama looks like a simian Hitler. The weirdos always, always wind up speaking for you. You might have taken some lessons from how the Tea Party made their points. But no. If Occupy hadn’t started with breaking the law by sleeping on public property, maybe the crowd would be different. But now we’ll never know, will we? And instead of getting any kind of constructive message articulated, you wind up with people like this:
Classy.
My point is that while there is a possibility that a lot of the truly idiotic acts that have been attributed to Occupy may or may not be coming from actual protesters, it doesn’t matter. The way the entire protest has been framed is now a fait accompli. And it didn’t have to be that way.
From what I can tell, the people who actually began this protest are smart, savvy people with a good head on their shoulders and the advantage of actually being, you know, right about the issue at hand. Global corporations (and the people who run them) have used capitalism to perpetrate environmental destruction, endless war, a gaping and growing gap between the rich and the poor, constant illness requiring constant healthcare consumption, desperate poverty in our own nation and abroad, and the dwindling relevance of the American worker. This is all stuff well worth protesting. In fact, it is all stuff that requires protest. But the rhetoric of how Occupy addresses this is all wrong. It’s messy, flawed, vague, based on a practice that breaks the law, and as such, opens a space for the really, really dumb rhetoric that has, sadly, come to exemplify the entire movement. Blame the press if it makes you feel better. Say the people who punched that cop were planted, if that gives you something to tell your therapist. But the truth is, it’s too late. By failing to take control of the message at the beginning, it stopped being yours to control.
And now, you’re entire movement, what could have been the American Autumn to follow the Arab Spring, is reduced to this guy:
So what happens now? Well, if we’re going to follow with my branding analogy here, you do damage control.
First, get the fuck out of the park. You’ve done all you can there. Pack up the tent, rent an office (with that $1.2 million in donations) and start working.
Second: build the Occupy brand like you’re starting from scratch. The commercials are a good start. It’s really almost too late to recuperate from the disastrous events in the parks over the past 3 weeks, but the message needs to be that you are the 99%. Not in number (we get that already) but in culture. The face of occupy can’t be the guy above with his emergency crocs and stupid sign. The message can’t be that capitalism doesn’t work. It needs to be that capitalism isn’t being allowed to work. See what I did there? Normal people can understand a movement that, you know, doesn’t start dancing down the red-brick Communism road. The solution needs to be presented in the context of action items people can understand. What can be done (try things like “not camp out in a park,” for starters)? How can people vote? Who can they write to? Where can they donate? What is the actual problem (Hint: it’s not the CEOs. It’s the lack of corporate regulation and campaign finance oversight that allows them to exist the way they are)? How can we solve it? How can the real 99%, the ones too busy (or well-reasoned) to camp in a park take action to affect real change? There are answers for these questions. You know them. Now get out of your tent and start making a difference.
