#OccupyVancouver ?

Hopefully you are aware that there has now been close to a month long protest in wall street...

http://occupywallst.org/

What is more is that this ambiguous and amorphous protest of a variety of things is spreading across the continent...

The first general assembly for Occupy Vancouver is tomorrow:
W2 Media Cafe - 111 W. Hastings St. Saturday, October 8 - 1:00pm

http://occupyvancouver.com

They intend on staging their occupation beginning on Oct 15th in front of the art gallery...(not in protest of art but based on space and proximity to Howe)

Garret Menges posted the following quote from adBusters in a satus update:

The rat-bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to "reach out and touch someone" with a telephone or "be there!"--these lovecrafty suckers are trying to turn you into a scrunched-up, blood-drained, pathetic, crippled little cog in the death-machine of the human soul. Fight them--by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship--and you will have triumphed over the most pernicious conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today--the conspiracy to turn you into a living corpse galvanized by prosthesis and the terror of scarcity--to turn you into a spook haunting your own brain.

I posted this Oscar Wilde quote a while ago:

It is immoral to use private property to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.

There is clearly a growing discontent and critique of of our post modern consumer capitalism and the inevitability of its failure...

There has certainly been significant anti-empire language used on this blog... 

I feel like, maybe, we are standing on the precipice of something big...

So is Occupying Vancouver fighting the empire?

Can we please define empire before its too late?

Are we going to participate?

How is global economic failure going to effect society?

I think that our generation has been raised on stories of glories of the protests of sixties over Vietnam and civil rights...

I think that we have been raised watching Star Wars and know instinctively to fight those who would dominate the world with fear and violence...

The generation that fought in WWI remembered glamourized war. The generation that fought in WWII idealized war.  Vietnam destroyed moral superiority. The cold war killed idealism. The war on terror is ending fear? Every generation forgets, every generation believes, every generation remakes the world, is this that moment? The moment of revolution... A revolution of what and to what?

According to Occupy Vancouver:

It is time to come together and educate each other. We will stand in solidarity with these other movements and we will create a platform for people to speak and provide an audience that will listen.
Let them gawk, let them ask questions, let them wake up. 

We realize that our social, economic, and political structures are broken. This is more than just a protest "against" something. It is about coming together as people, acknowledging things are broken, and working together to fix them.

If you are thinking that that very ambiguous you are correct.

"This protest cannot be boiled down to a simple soundbite because this protest is ambitiously seeking a complex, fundamental, philosophical change in the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country... The strength of Occupy... lies in the ambiguity of its mission. There is no laundry list of specific, unreasonable, and untenable demands. There is only the demand for change. Change of, by, and for the people, enacted by our elected officials. If the powers-that-be respond with absolutely nothing, then it is clear that they will never, ever be interested in effecting substantial change of our financial system, no matter how strong public support may be."
- Edward Murray, Huffington Post

Silas articulated via something he heard that the ambiguity is positive in that it does not allow itself to be co opted to single agendas or groups - the ambiguity forces conversation and dialogue as a starting place. 

Clearly the ambiguity has allowed for a unity in discontent. 

However, there is an emptiness to the demand for change that offers no plan, no solution and continues to look for the "powers" to satiate their thirst for change...

Zizek has suggested that the lack of actual coherent voice in the protests across the world, from greece to london to New York to Vancouver, other than complaint is the breeding ground for support for totalitarianism. That the blind support for change is liable to support a dictator who offers salvation... that between the financial crisis and the social unrest we are writing a story that is starting to sound like 1930's Germany...

Here is an article by Zizek on the London riots:

Shop Lifters of the World Unite

Clearly the Occupy movement is different but is it different enough?

Based on the immanence of this we are going to spend this week exclusively writing, thinking and researching this and will probably show up on the 15th to have some conversations...

Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Rhetoric? Propaganda? Hope? Alternatives?