Define 'Occupy'

Occupy Iowa City, we hardly knew ye.

You remained an enigma from your first, tentative steps in October through your swelling ranks and bulging statements of principles to your quiet dwindling as the days shortened and nights grew cold.

Some will argue that Iowa City's decision this week not to renew occupiers' permit to protest in College Green Park is no big thing - that it just marks one more transition in an ever-evolving movement.

But “movement” is beginning to seem a generous word for what Occupy has become: a loose affiliation of people who occasionally get together to form committees or heckle a presidential candidate.

I'm starting to wonder if we pinned too many hopes on an event which, after all, started out as a magazine “what if.”

Instead of crystallizing our discontent, the occupation has confused it, snowballing from a protest against Wall Street and runaway corporatism into an unwieldy list of gripes.

Back in October, I took some grief for saying I didn't get what Occupiers hoped to accomplish. The vagueness, the diffusion were part of the process, supporters said. The Occupation was a crucible from which every good thing would be forged.

But here we are, four months older. What exactly has it wrought?

I can't help but think back to successful grass-roots movements in recent Iowa City memory.

Take Students Against Sweatshops' six-day occupation of University of Iowa administrative offices in 2000, which gave birth to a code of conduct for all companies with UI licensing contracts, prohibiting child labor and guaranteeing that workers producing university-related goods are paid decent wages.

Or 15 years earlier, when UI students and their peers at other college campuses pressured the institutions to divest from dealings with segregated South Africa.

Those movements had a lot in common besides success. They had a clear message and a clearly defined goal. They relied on a core group of motivated members unified around a specific, common purpose. They fought for something, not only against.

I first asked the question last fall, and still I wonder: What is Occupy Iowa about?

It might not be too late to make this primordial soup of activism coalesce into a movement - or many - with the power to enact positive change.

But if Occupy doesn't want to waste away the way the physical protest did at College Green Park, it will have to work even harder to figure out, and help us see, exactly where it stands.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net