Back Office in Bloomfield

I'm behind the bars of the window screen. All work and no wander.

We’re on our second day of visiting my hometown Occupy, Louisville! We’ll combine it with visits to the Occupy in Lexington, the city of my birth. But our mornings of back office work are rural, at my family’s farm near Bloomfield, Kentucky. As I work away on emails and follow up phone calls, trying to finalize workshop times and set up fundraiser house parties, I’m stuck in the front parlor of this old farmhouse. I wouldn’t choose any other activity in this moment, but those rolling hills do call through the window screen.

Our dog Tuatha is bored silly, with my nephew in school and no one interested in frequent ball games. My sister-in-law tried to take him for a walk on the farm, but he’s back in the house, so it didn’t take. Not without Mama!

C.T. is also busy following up with potential funders and a publisher who is considering distributing C.T.’s consensus books to a national base. We have sold more books in the last month and a half than in the last three years.

"Why are you taking my picture?" "Don't worry. The light is all wrong. This one won't get used."

If you pick up on the main stream media’s message that Occupy is history, think again. Demand for our work says otherwise.

In fact, the bias of corporate-owned media continues with today’s coverage of the Occupy shut down of ports, depicting the action as harming the port workers, who are part of the 99%. No real attempt to counterweigh that with Occupy’s motivations was made in the CNN article I read.

Our work continues. We ran out of Consensus for Cities, C.T.’s book on how to do consensus in groups of 100,000 or more. So we had more printed and shipped to us on the road. Now we’re restocked and debuted the new copies on the square in Louisville last night.

Louisville’s General Assembly was quite civil, compared to many where we’ve seen novice facilitators struggle with how to manage disruptors shouting. This group seems to have moved unruly people out of their encampment. Even so, they’ve had to deal with theft, drugs and other issues that happen when you arrive in a public space and set up free food, blankets and tents! Occupy groups are learning to clarify their concepts of membership. The experiment continues!