Occupy Harrisonburg Vision Statement

Occupy Harrisonburg

Revisioning a World that Works

4.14.2012

The world we must create in order to survive is also the vision that unites us.

-David Korten

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 

‘We want to be free.’

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

April 3, 1968

(the night before he was assassinated)

No matter who we are or what country we live in, most of us want the same things. We want to be happy and to avoid suffering. We want healthy families, natural beauty, a clean environment, and a just society.  We want meaningful work, sound education, nutritious food, good health, and the opportunity to live dynamic and meaningful lives in harmony with our neighbors and engaged in our communities. We believe, as Dr. King did, that humans hold a universal desire to be free.

As we look around, however, we see that few people and fewer societies have attained this ideal.  Given this reality, we, the masses, are rising up.

Emboldened by the undeniable power of human bodies in the streets and enabled by the stunning connection of social media, individuals the world-over are protesting, rebelling, envisioning, and recreating their stories and societies. The Occupy movement, inspired by the revolutionary waves of protests and demonstrations that began in the Arab world at the end of 2010, has spread to more than 900 cities in 82 countries.  Occupy Harrisonburg, born of this movement, has occupied the Gazebo at Court Square since October 17, 2011, embracing the audacious goal of changing for the better the world in which we live.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

-Gandhi

The global financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath made abundantly clear to ordinary people that our lives and our governments are controlled by financial entities that care little for ordinary people or common human values that unite us.

Good, hard-working individuals are dropping below the poverty line in record numbers. Unemployment weakens our communities, undermines our families, and destroys our self-esteem. Millions have lost their homes to foreclosures. Our nation faces inadequate education and health care, rising infant mortality rates, truncated life expectancy, addiction, alcoholism, workaholism, lack of civic engagement, high anxiety and depression rates, destroyed culture, and downward social mobility.

Meanwhile large corporations report record profits.

Many of these problems can be traced to a single pathological tendency that has hijacked our economic system and our democracy: an obsession with short-term financial gain. Fast profit has become the single yardstick by which we measure the value of our businesses and nations – and is the driving force behind the global economy.

We’ve witnessed our financial institutions converted into gigantic casinos by the creation of vast and unstable markets of so-called “derivatives.” By design, our financial system now lies beyond the understanding and scrutiny of the ordinary citizens it is supposed to serve. Through deregulation, that system has been stripped of financial controls that protected our prosperity since the Great Depression.

Without public accountability, big banks and big corporations wield their enormous wealth to seize control of our political system, re-write our tax laws, commercialize our agriculture, keep us dependent on fossil fuels, desecrate our environment, and sell the lie that consumerism is a form of empowerment.

The United States now has the highest income inequality of all democratic nations in the world.  Main Street has been sold out to Wall Street and need has succumbed to greed.

Any model of economic engagement that focuses solely on short-term gain is short-sighted, unsustainable, and unacceptable for all; even those who have become rich from economic plunder. No woman or man is an island, and even the wealthiest person stands to benefit from a healthy society and ecosystem.

Another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

-MLK, Jr.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. 

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
― Arundhati Roy

As Dr. King realized, with crisis comes opportunity. Thus, the current point of world crisis affords many opportunities: to live our values, to take responsibility for our governance, and to create a new economy that serves people and preserves the planet.

We draw inspiration from what author Charles Eisenstein calls “Sacred Economics,” an economic model that mimics the interdependence of healthy ecosystems. In a sacred economy, we turn from short term “non-vision” to the Iroquois tradition of asking what impact today’s decisions will have seven generations from now. And we understand that raw competition and “survival of the fittest” are not the highest natural laws. In the natural world cooperation is a more fundamental law than competition.

As we move toward a sacred economy, we shift focus from standard of living to quality of life, and from consumerist want to simple need.

We begin by acknowledging the suicidal pointlessness of current economic indicators such as the GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measure nothing of intrinsic value. Wars, gratuitous material excess, and environmental destruction for short-term gain all raise the GDP while unraveling the fabric of society.  Our planet is in critical condition.  Most of the natural systems that sustain us are at the brink of collapse.

In contrast, a sacred economy invokes “living-wealth” indicators that foster healthy, egalitarian relationships and environmental care and healing. One such indicator, the “healthy planet index” (Korten, 2010, p. 170), is defined as the product of mean life expectancy and mean life satisfaction divided by mean ecological footprint. The index is highest when the majority of the population is healthy, happy, and living sustainably.

We participants of Occupy Harrisonburg do not claim to have all the answers. Nevertheless, step-by-step we are liberating ourselves from the captivity of the current economic system which is intentionally opaque and mystifying.  We are envisioning a dynamic and transparent institutional system determined by a radically democratic culture of participation and engagement.

We are grappling with difficult questions of what it means to live as individuals in a greater context of interdependence with others.

We are radically reexamining our spiritual and economic priorities, our life’s work, our life’s passions, and the responsibility we claim for creating the world in which we wish to live.

By the practice of humility, vulnerability, gratitude and frugality we access our own deep wisdom and power, recognize and accept the unique gifts of others and flourish as individuals in the context of community.

Finally, we understand that envisioning a new society depends on the radical inclusiveness of all citizens. Therefore we invite YOU to offer your gifts and to participate, grapple, engage, challenge, and create the new world in which we will all thrive.

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.
― bell hooks