Occupiers need focus, new strategy

If there is such a thing as passive activism, it is being embodied here, unfortunately, by the encampment at the corner of Beretania Street and Ward Avenue. Like its sister-city protests, Occupy Honolulu, the local offshoot of the nationwide movement, is mired in a cluster of disparate causes aimlessly seeking a real, lasting effect.

What began so promisingly as Occupy Wall Street in New York, an organic outpouring of justified disappointment in Big Government and Big Business, is now sputtering.

The idea of trying to effect change from the outside was wildly romantic: Could rousting the 99 percent off the treadmill really get the 1 percent to change the centralization of power and money?

The heady whiff of revolution was rightly in the air then — but with each passing month since September, when the U.S. movement started, the answer, increasingly, is turning no. And that’s a shame.

Lack of focus and of a unified plan of action has down-turned the tide. The populist protest that sprang from middle- and below-middle-class woes has deteriorated to a hodge-podge of confusion.

Many of the Occupy protesters’ bitterness was legitimate: over corporate bailouts; huge public debt; a bickering, feckless Congress; a tanked economy and stagnating unemployment; the chasm between the haves and have-nots. Indeed, in its zenith in mid-October, Occupy organizers touted that demonstra- tions would be held in some 950 cities across 82 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

The movement mirrored true revolutions worldwide; so successful was people power, in fact, that Time magazine just named "The Protester" its 2011 person of the year. Across countries rejoicing in the Arab Spring — from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Libya, to Syria — to Russia, citizens mobilized against dictatorship and corruption.

To be sure, not all uprisings succeed. Some are quelled by death and violence in authoritarian regimes; others, like Occupy, can atrophy without directed purpose in self-important democracies.

Civil disobedience is important in tapping the collective conscience of a citizenry, mobilizing them en masse to affect dynamic change. How such protest manifests itself — or not — is the ever-present, needed tension in the body politic. Will the status quo be pushed to evolve?

That raises a fundamental flaw in how the Occupy movements have faltered to this point: they’ve gotten the citizenry’s attention, but don’t know what to do with it.

Much of the early empathy for the movement further eroded recently when protesters in port cities like Oakland, Portland and Seattle tried to block shipping terminals. The goal was confused, as front-line workers lost wages, causing many to wonder why a movement that railed against "The Man" ended up hurting the working man.

Success by the U.S. Occupiers will depend on a core, focused message channeled into real, constructive action — and soon. The encampments, some of which on the mainland have deteriorated into hubs of criminal and unsavory activity, need to pull up stakes and make change happen. That might mean effecting change from within, by taking the focused message to City Hall; actually fielding viable Occupy candidates in next year’s election; or working to get the ears and support of influential allies to hone legislation.

Sleeping on the street corner, waiting earnestly for something significant to happen, will guarantee only one thing: That nothing will.