Meet Professor Occupy

[xchrom]

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/lisa-fithian-occupy-wall-street-teaching-civil-disobedience



In her makeshift classroom in lower Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a group of several dozen students, squares her shoulders, and issues a challenge: "Does someone want to be a cop and come get me?" A tall redhead abruptly breaks out and lunges at her, but Fithian, a petite, den-motherish 50-year-old, head fakes and bolts away. Cheers erupt from her pupils, Occupy Wall Street protesters intent on shutting down the New York Stock Exchange the following morning. Another pretend cop moves in, and this time she drops to the ground, flopping like a rag doll as the officer struggles to drag her away. Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. "Of the two choices, running away or going limp, what does running away communicate?" she asks.

"Guilt," several people say.

She smiles and nods. "Guilt."

When it comes to civil disobedience, there's often a right and wrong way to break the law, and one of Fithian's jobs is to teach the right way to hundreds of newly minted Occupy activists. Call her Professor Occupy. With somewhere between 80 and 100 arrests under her belt (she's lost count) over nearly four decades of rabble-rousing, Fithian may be the nation's best-known protest consultant. Unions and activist groups pay her $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach their members tactics for taking over the streets. But for much of the past six months Fithian has been dispensing free wisdom to the young radicals who took over parks from New York City to Los Angeles last fall, everything from proper tear gas attire to long-term protest strategies. "When there is some conflict, or things aren't going the way that we want them to go, or people don't have a good long-term plan," says 27-year-old Jason Ahmadi, an early arrival at Zuccotti Park, "I have heard others and myself say, 'Dammit, where is Lisa Fithian?'"

Fithian, who lives in Austin, Texas, but spends most of her time on the road, dresses like Mark Zuckerberg and swears like Tony Soprano. She grew up in Hawthorne, New York, a Big Apple bedroom community where she developed a reputation for trouble—police might knock on her door to inquire about, say, a suspicious fire in a neighbor's front yard. In middle school, she once got busted for bringing a knife to class. But she was smart and earnest, and as a high school sophomore she founded The Free Thinker, an underground newspaper that tackled subjects like littering in the cafeteria. Her classmates voted her "Most likely to do things for the school." They also voted her "Most likely to do things to the school."

[pinboy3niner]

1. Very impressive--and the last 2 sentences are laugh-out-loud funny!

Thanks or posting!

[Zorra]

2. "Most likely to do things for the school."..."Most likely to do things to the school"

OMG...

...I think I'm in love.


☮CCUPY

[limpyhobbler]

3. I particularly liked this bit here

As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal tension is between the reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the revolutionaries, idealists who feel that asking anything of a corrupt system only marginalizes the movement. "This isn't a protest movement, because protest movements are to address issues that the power structure could conceivably be willing to give up," a black-clad occupier named Max Bean told Fithian over lunch in early December."We are asking to dissolve the power structure. And you can't ask for that. You can't protest for it. All you can do is grow until we are so big that we are everything."

Fithian weighed her response carefully. "Movements build because people have some sense of hope and victory and accomplishment," she replied, setting aside her plate of steamed kale. "We might win on the millionaires' tax in the next six months. That's gonna be fucking huge." She smiled as Max gave her "twinkle fingers," the Occupy hand signal for approval. "So it's the balance between reforming and revolutionary things. And that's why this movement is so beautiful because it holds both."

I liked that bit where she said "because it holds both".