*correction to the Bangor Daily article* Alba Briggs said that uprooting the camp would mean throwing away the last month of work we’ve put in. Not me.
I said that, yes, we may be the top-clicked story on the Bangor Daily website (partly no doubt because of all you beloved “Get A Job” trolls venting your spleens) — but we pull up our tents, we’re a flash in the pan and forgotten by Bangor.
America is sick. Terribly sick. It should be possible for a man making minimum wage to support a wife and three kids, without a dime of government assistance. We had that once. But now, minimum wage isn’t enough to support yourself.
We need to *push* American society off its present self-destructive course and onto a more reasonable one. This takes *time*. We *need* to keep at this.
Our white-collar organizational leaders, who put forth the proposal to pull up the camp, without actually *telling* anyone who lived at camp ahead of time, tell us maintaining the camp takes too much time, too much energy. Some of the ones saying this, like Valerie, really put their heart and soul into keeping the camp alive.
Other of those leaders, I can’t tell you what they do to keep camp running. Sunny once called the encampment the “heart and soul” of Bangor’s Occupy movement. Was up in arms when the city wanted us just to apply for a permit. Now she wants us shut down.
What I said was, we decamp, and we become just another white-collar activist group doing deskwork and promotional stunts. Camping out in Maine weather *means* something, and this is what has the nice old women from the Peace and Justice center running scared. Trying to uproot our camp for our own good.
It’s amazing to me that we have to fight not only City Hall, but our own leadership to stay alive.