Media Consortium Cab Ride

The other day I gave Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Media Consortium Executive
Director, a ride from San Francisco International Airport to her home in San Francisco. She had just returned from the East Coast where she had met face-to-face with some members of her alliance of progressive, independent media outlets that is dedicated to “amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones.”

Peppering her with questions about her work as I often do with my passengers, I soon learned that a recent example of the kind of project she’d like to do again was the collaboration with 32 partners she organized to report on Occupy actions throughout the country on May 1. Calling themselves “Media for the 99 Percent,” these diverse outlets offered live TV and streaming broadcast, an interactive map, breaking news reporting, and coordinated social media coverage across their sites, reaching a combined audience of more than 50 million Americans.

After May 1, their website reported:

Some cities excelled at coordination among labor, immigration, and Occupy groups. In Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, labor and Occupy groups worked together to lead mostly peaceful joint actions and sit-ins.
In other cities, protesters were less organized and elements of their groups engaged in property destruction. Local police in Seattle, Oakland, and Portland responded with crackdowns that included arrests, tear gas, and kettling. Some reports said officers were throwing people off their bikes and beating resisting protesters with police batons. But the isolated actions of a few individuals did not define the entire movement.
Leading a nationwide general strike is an ambitious goal, so it is no surprise that the number of May Day protesters was smaller than activists had hoped for. But May Day succeeded in its goal to be a nationwide protest that united activists in cities and towns across the country and signaled the return of the Occupy movement.

Her work on this project, it seems to me, provided her with a special overview of the Occupy movement. From her perspective, with the exception of the Bay Area where so many “professional activists” had already launched many organizations, in most parts of the country Occupy Wall Street inspired concerned citizens locally to fill a vacuum in a non-extremist manner to address the top two Occupy concerns: growing economic inequality and the corruption of our politics by big money.

Most Occupy activists nationwide, she said, have not been anti-capitalist or opposed to all government. Rather, they have wanted to fix the system with fundamental reforms so middle-class citizens like themselves will have more economic opportunity and a greater voice in governmental affairs. In the Bay Area, however, using the leverage afforded a small minority by the consensus-based decision-making process, as I reported last fall in Wade’s Weekly, hyper-individualist anarchists managed to define Occupy as a radical fringe group out of touch with the mainstream.

According to Kaiser, the May 1 actions demonstrated that Occupy still has legs in many areas of the country. Most of this activity, however, has a local focus, especially with actions focused on stopping foreclosures. Currently, there is no Occupy national thrust, no national presence. This lack is regrettable.

Now we need a model Gandhi-King campaign focused on the founding principles of the Occupy movement. Granted, the odds are long and the obstacles are many. But if we get our act together and do it right, who knows? We may be able to help spark a national Occupy renewal. Or perhaps the metamorphosis of Occupy into a new brand, “the social transformation movement,” or simply “the transformation movement.”

With no expectations, why not try? Why not act as if we can and give it our best shot? Given the urgency of our situation, if we are concerned about the future of humanity and life on Earth, aren’t we morally obligated to give it our best shot? All we can do is fail and be accused of utopian ambitions.

But that’s what most people thought about that small band of pragmatic idealists who occupied Wall Street last year. And even if we “fail,” it will be a learning experience. As Bob Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure"

In “The Art of Failing Successfully,” Jonah Lehrer reported on how we can learn when we make mistakes. Initially, humans react to mistakes with a strong, involuntary response, followed quickly by a neurological signal that involves paying attention to the screw up. And those whose initial response is stronger and who focus more persistently on the error learn more from it.

Moreover, people with a “fixed mindset” who agree with statements like "You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it" learn less than those with a “growth mindset” who believe they can “get better at almost anything” if they work at it. The former tend to see failures as “purely negative” while the latter see mistakes as “an essential precursor to knowledge.”

When teachers praise students for "being smart," those students tend to fall into a fixed mindset and assume that mistakes are a sign of stupidity. But when students are instead praised for their effort, they’re more likely to adopt a growth mindset, be less afraid of making mistakes, and better able to repair their self-esteem and transform failure into success. Mindset matters.

As Lehrer concludes, “Dylan was right, but failure alone is not enough. We need to learn how to fail better.” So let us grow the self-confidence to set aside ego, endure failure, and do our best to help grow a potent, national grassroots movement to deal with this country’s obscene inequality and political corruption.