Dear fellow Guelphites,
I am writing to you not as an official representative, but as an active participant in the Occupy Guelph movement that started last Saturday, October 15th in St. George’s Square, in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. and the more than 1500 similar occupations happening around the world.
The Occupy movement is not about any single issue. It represents a mass gathering of people worldwide in response to corruption, inequality, greed, environmental destruction, unjust wars, and numerous other ills that have so rigorously haunted our times.
Participants in the occupations come from all walks of life and in many cities rally under the banner “We are the 99%”, referring to the inequitable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of 1% of the population. Occupy Guelph has chosen by consensus its own special rallying cry: “Life Before Profits!”
We are committed to non-violence.
Today, Thursday October 20th, 2011 marks day six of the encampment in St. George’s Square. Occupy Wall St. started out small and Occupy Guelph is starting out no differently. I am writing because we need more support, we need more feet on the ground, we need more representation from the dozens of community organizations in Guelph who fight every day for justice and equality.
We need our students. We need our elders. We need our activists. We need our unions. We need our community leaders. Everyone is welcome. No one requires an invitation.
Occupy Guelph is run as a leaderless, horizontal democracy based on individual initiative and collective consensus. We hold a general assembly every day at noon and 6 pm and I encourage everyone to attend these sessions.
Several of us have been working on organizing workshops where members of the community can freely and informally discuss issues of their choosing, whether that be aboriginal rights, the labour movement, water scarcity, the finance industry, queer culture, the tar sands, gender equality, political engagement, tuition fees…there is truly no limit to the possibilities. I encourage everyone to come down to St. George’s Square and organize or simply announce a time to discuss the great work that your organization does or an issue with which you feel a particular affinity.
Occupy Guelph needs more folks with special skills, with tech savvy, with facilitation experience, with miles under their shoes in the world of political activism. We need a master tarp-rigger who can keep us shielded from storms like the one last night! Again, I encourage everyone to just show up. There is no reason to be shy or feel intimidated. This is a movement of the people. The only thing we are missing right now is the people.
We have had many folks showing their support with warm wishes and food donations. We cannot thank them enough.
We are planning an Occupy Guelph Family Day this Saturday in St. George’s Square that all are welcome to attend, organize and run.
Movements of this scale do not happen every lifetime. There is a lot of work ahead of us but together I am absolutely certain we can do it. Please come down to St. George’s Square. Bring your signs. Bring your expertise. Bring your frustrations and your urge to transform this world into the one it deserves to be.
Flood St. George’s Square.
Life Before Profits!
In solidarity,
Patrick Cieslar
P.S. For more information on the global Occupy movement, visit: http://www.occupytogether.org/
Please forward this email to anyone who you think may be interested in participating.
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Im working on a video that will publicize the movement on the internet and will educate the people of the current state of our world to them to wake up and create change
It is my sincerest hope that this movement continues to develope and grow. I, as so many others, have ideas about what I’d like to see it become, and have been disappointed in the misrepresentation that media seems to have slotted this movement into. I am also pleased that the movement was brought out into the openness of the scrutiny of the media thanks to the occupiers who put so much of themselves, their effort, and their time and thought, into the actual physical occupation of property, without which, this movement would have dried up and discintegrated without even a sigh for a response.
Keep the spirit, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, creeds, colours, and dispositions. I’ve heard it called a “leaderless” movement. I prefer to see it as a leaderful movement, where all are leaders of their own lives, fully capable of discerning for themselves the wrongness of the direction the “authorities” have chosen. Those “Authorities”, are not our leaders. When we charge them with the duties of custodianship, I think we’ll have a clearer understanding of their failure, and a better sense of the direction to point them in.
If Society is a place where people can choose to interact, or not, without the fear of coercion, then why don’t we establish an institution charged with that function.
Oh, wait; perhaps we did, but as is the nature of all institutions, it tended to maximize it’s resources and become self serving. If we manage to turn it around, perhaps we’ll be more wary, and guard against such “evolution” in the future.
Good luck to us all. I think the future of civilization depends on this more than we may realize.