The sit-ins in NC are effective because they are highly organized and nonviolent. The police were notified in advance and the arrests are not conducted in an adversarial way. (I heard that the Repub legislature in NC was foolish enough to try to make cuts to police budgets.) If there is violence it must all be on the part of the government. The citizens at home need to see that THEY (THE 1%) are attacking our freedoms. We are citizen protesters, not hooligans. We represent our country and the values of our citizens; THEY are attacking our freedoms.

In any violent confrontation we will lose; if we remain peaceful we win. When nonviolent people are clearly being attacked, people at home can identify with the protesters. Our government has been taking away our homes and our jobs and our privacy and freedoms. Occupy has had an ongoing moral effect because the optics of police attacking young people, especially unarmed young women, provides a visual shorthand for what the government is doing to all of us.

How much of it is organic and how much of it is manufactured will be a question for the ages.

As for me, I find I'm grateful that I'm getting old.

not the Democrats in particular.

Just imagine 80-90% of the electorate voting for the entity of their choice, as a result of all this 'energy', newly found.

I was thinking generally, see my response above.

A couple of months is the wrong timeline. If all this energy exists, why wasn't it put to good use over the last year.

Anyway...

...yet another online petition on Facebook...

rang my BS meter, too. As someone who worked in the Sanders' campaign, I can state that violence was not encouraged nor approved. It was simply grassroots' common sense. $hrill's ilk has none.

The protestors are aiming at the wrong target.

talking about paying people to be violent at Trump rallies. It's coming from both sets of crazies.

is when the revolution will turn for the positive. I keep thinking of Chris Hedges's wonderful story about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which was preceded by the turning point of East German soldiers refusing their orders to fire on civilians.

I can’t tell you where the Occupy movement is going; no one knows—I’ve covered movements. I’ve covered both of the Palestinian uprisings. I’ve covered most of the revolutions in Eastern Europe.

I was in East Germany in 1989, Czechoslovakia and later in Romania. I grew up in a small farm town in upstate New York. It was communist this and communist that and after a few days in Romania I spoke to friends I grew up with and I said you know all those things they told us about communists, they are true.

What was interesting about the movements is that even the purported leaders of these movements didn’t know where they were going. You have a few Lutheran pastors and congregants holding candlelight vigils … and then suddenly one day instead of 70 people it’s 200 people and then the next thing you know in September of 1989 it’s 70,000 people.

Erich Honecker sends down an elite paratrooper group to fire on the crowd. When the officers go in the barracks the paratroopers are weeping because they have family members in those demonstrations. When they physically get down there but the local Communist Party refuses to give them the order to open fire on the crowd and Honecker lasts another week in power. When you can pull those kinds of numbers to discredit.

This was the most efficient police state at the time in the world. For every 63 East Germans there was an informant. It fell. I was with the leaders of the East German opposition on the afternoon of November 9, 1989, and I remember them telling me that perhaps within a year there would be free passage back and forth across the Berlin Wall. Within a few hours the Berlin Wall at least did not exist.

To me this is a very important element we should be taking seriously and attempting to make inroads with. Most of us reflexively have disdain for the cops because of their conservative RW tendencies which breeds adversity toward the ideas of free speech and progressive values, including me. But there are a good many I believe who are reachable.

Whenever this subject comes up I am reminded of how important it is that we begin relations with local cops and the military, who though known adversaries to Left Wing folks must be approached (and I say this understanding the difficulty because I loathe the institutions and their brainwashing), softened by the realization that they are pawns being used for the protection of the 1% and their property. From being a many protests in NYC I sense that there are definitely at least a few who would be receptive to such discussion. There's never been a better time too, when all these cops on their downtime while on patrol can read various dissenting ideas and begin to think differently than their brainwashing that everyone they encounter is a potential perpetrator who needs to be arrested, with the exception of Wall St bankers of whom there only interaction with is getting cush off-duty security jobs and free football tickets.

Similar to the great scene in Dr. Zhivago when his brother is telling the story of his greatest triumph, in which he was able to convince whole battalions to desert the front line in the war against Germany by telling them they had no quarrel as Russian baker's sons with German baker's sons, and that this war was for the exploits of the rich alone at the bloody expense of young working class men, we must convince the average cop that their commanders similarly hobnob with the 1% elites and do their bidding and are given ornate perks for it (New Yorker article on relationship between Mayor and Police Commissioner, "These days, Bratton spends his off-duty time with one-percenters who he says disdain the mayor; de Blasio’s downtime is more likely to be spent sweating in souvenir T-shirts at the Park Slope Y.") while they have to endure the drudgery of filling quotes every month.

The cops on the beat, on the front lines orders to corral protesters, have to see their neighbors and peers up close, face to face. There's opportunity there for, if not a coalition, some kind of bond or understanding.