My First General Assembly

So I went back to Occupy Tampa on Saturday, October 29th. Much bigger crowd this time around. They had a drum circle going when I arrived, and something about it put me in a protesting mood. All sorts of political conversations were going on around me. It was a much more diverse crowd this time, someone even brought their kid, who was more than happy to take up the cause.

About a half hour into protesting someone shouted “Mic check!”, and I responded almost instinctively with the rest of the crowd. I was glad I saw all those videos explaining the human mic process before hand. Anyway, it was announced that there was going to be a general assembly. I was very excited, I was finally going to see how these meetings worked in person. I won’t go into everything the meeting covered here, I’m sure they’ll put the minutes of it up on their site anyway.

I will say that it was very organized, and I was impressed how easily we were all able to come to consensus on all the proposals. We didn’t all agree, that much was clear from the hand signs. But we didn’t let that stop us from making decisions the way it seems to stop Congress.

It was a little weird being a human mic at first, but I quickly got used to it. I actually think it helped my compression by forcing me to listen to every word that was said. A few were very averse to using the People’s Mic, but we could still hear them fine thanks to the acoustics of the meeting place.

All in all I give the Occupy Revolution a 10 out of 10. This movement is for everyone, join us.

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