re: #308 SanFranciscoZionist

Michael Lerner is trying to work with Occupy Oakland.

God, I feel for those poor SOBs.

I’ve been involved in Occupy Oakland—celebrating its beauty and strength, and yet trying to convince them to explicitly embrace nonviolence and reject destruction of property (without forgetting that the violence of the system that we are protesting is far worse than anything done by the small group of property-destroyers). Yet those who advocate “a legitimate role for violence” or participate in smashing windows at corporations like Whole Foods (yes, that’s where they smashed windows!) actually end up providing perceived legitimacy in the public mind for police violence. They make it easy for the media to shift attention away from the legitimate demands of this movement. The Occupy movement has already made a powerful contribution by helping people see their situation in terms of the 99 percent who have suffered from the class war that has been waged against us by the 1 percent and their various allies in the media, the political establishment, the corporations, many of the big foundations, and academia. I’ve written about this on our website (www.tikkun.org), and I hope you’ll read my article there titled “Praying with our Feet at Occupy Oakland.”

I was actually quite disturbed this past Wednesday, November 9 when someone calling for non-violence at Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly was booed when he mentioned the names of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and later when a motion endorsing “a variety of tactics” (code words for allowing continuation of property destruction as one of that “variety”) received close to 65 percent of the vote (though it didn’t pass, because they require 80 percent to pass). Please do check out my article on all this. I am very supportive and enthusiastic about the Occupy movement, and think it has done so much to help revitalize hope and consciousness about the vast inequalities and injustices in our own society, so I really don’t want any of its branches to shoot themselves in their own feet! You can read more about this by clicking here.

And yes, he always writes like that.