Just the facts:
I attended a moveon.org seminar yesterday, Saturday April 14, 2012. The purpose of the event was to train future community organizers/activists.
The seminar was held in West Providence Rhode Island at the Knight Memorial Library. There were 34 participants and two facilitators. Of the participants present the average age was between 45 and 50 with 7 males and 27 females making up the attendees. Of the males present 3 were of college age and attended the seminar for credit at local colleges or universities. About an equal number of females were there of similar age however they did not admit that they were there for college or university credits.
Of the remaining females attending I saw only one woman with a wedding ring on her finger. With that said many of the other women may have been married. It was also very obvious that about half of the women there were lesbians.
The two facilitators were in their 50?s and one was a female and one was a male. The ladies at my table (I was the only male) called the male facilitator ?Mr. Haines? as his slacks were riding low and his butt cheeks were hanging out over the top of his slacks. His white briefs were very evident and the word Haines was printed on the waist band, hence the nick name.
There was water and soda available along with snack size snacks.
Upon registering you were given a 60+ page bound instruction book that was used during the seminar for reference and training.
The facility over all was very nice and set up for the 85 people who had pre-registered. The facility could have housed 150. The library was located in the ?hood? and had limited parking. I was glad I had arrived early and was able to find parking in the library lot.
The seminar began promptly at 2:00PM ET with Mr. Haines banging a gong. It ended on time at 5:00PM ET.
The seminar:
In general as mentioned earlier the seminar was to address how to target a business entity and run an efficient nonviolent protest without being arrested against that business. The facilitator used a power point video as the curriculum which he stopped frequently to keep the class on schedule.
There was several roll playing activities; however they deteriorated quickly as there was not enough assistant facilitators to keep things under control. The best part of the day was how to plan an event. Here are the steps:
> Need a vision
> Set the goal of the protest
> Develop strategies to help in achieving the goal
> Decide on tactics that would support the strategies
> Assign logistic assignments
> Execute on the protest
> Post the event debrief on what went well and what didn?t.
Overall impression:
Throughout the 3 hour seminar and my networking before and after the seminar, in my opinion, many of the participants were anti-male, anti-bank and anti-business. When pressed on how they would fix things it always came back to needing a bigger government.
During the seminar I heard many side comments like:
> Can you believe that the Supreme Court has the ability to turn down a law like Obama
Care when the majority of the US citizenry want it
> Why should we support banks that were bailed out by the government
> Anybody who makes over $250,000.00 should forfeit those dollars to the government
> The government needs to close down radio and television stations that promote hate
speech (No specific radio or TV stations were mentioned)
My principle goal of attending the seminar was to listen and report. However on several occasions I did, in a friendly way, interject with questions or comments like:
> Who was going to pay for Insert Beef here?
> The Bill of Rights guarantees everyone the right to express their opinions.
> If you don?t like our form of government work towards a Constitutional Convention where
things can be changed.
Final impressions:
As organized as they were with the signups they fell apart post that. There was no follow up reminder to attend hence only 34 people attended out of the 85 that were signed up.
The two facilitators were very unorganized and due to Mr. Haines style of dress it detracted from the class.
There was a very good PowerPoint presentation to help the facilitators however they did not follow it.
Most of the attendees just seemed to want to bitch about ?the man? rather than learn something and organize. In my opinion none of these folks that left today will do anything other than to brag they attended this event.
With all of this said, the folks behind this event are producing a well-organized program which will do well in some cities.
There is a big protest walk planned to Bank of America on Tuesday of this week. All of the folks were going to withdraw their funds from the bank as a protest move, due to Bank of America?s foreclosure of homes in the area.
Last but most important: These folks were not angry- No, no, they HATED. Hated our Constitution; hated anybody with money. Hated business and hated the banks.
I am very interested in what other SP members hear and see at the meeting's they attend.
