Why the Occupy Movement Needs to Continue

Commissioner of Public Safety

City of Providence

Rhode Island

Dear Commissioner Pare,

First, I want to thank you for how you’ve dealt with Occupy Providence, so far. Your responsibilities are heavy, assuring the safety and welfare of all who visit, work and live in the city of Providence. Knowing how complex all this is, I have to thank you for the generous way you and the police and others with these responsibilities have dealt with the Occupy movement.

Together with a number of members of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, I attended the inauguration of Occupy Providence, Saturday afternoon, the 8^th of October. I personally saw how the police were courteous and helpful to all, both demonstrators and others. While I am grateful to the officers themselves, I can only assume you had a hand in the policy for dealing with the demonstration and the demonstrators.

Since then rumors have flown about regarding how long before the demonstration and its encampment are shut down. I myself was caught up in a rumor that said you’d given the Occupy demonstrators a deadline one day to shut down. It was wrong. Not long after I heard you were giving them two or three days. I could find no support for that rumor, either.

However, today I heard a report on WRNI that you have requested a date from the demonstrators for when they will end. I assume this is an accurate report.

And, I am writing to ask you to allow this demonstration to remain open-ended.

I believe the Occupy Wall Street movement is deeply informed by our American dream. I see it as profoundly patriotic, citizens who care, and see terrible difficulties, and are speaking out, calling our community to notice.

Two pillars support our republic: the inalienable rights of individuals and the shared responsibilities of belonging to a community. Somehow the balance has been lost and a headlong support of the individual ignoring how we also belong to a community, has led us to our current terrible circumstances. For too long our mutual responsibilities have been ignored and even steadily dismantled. The recent rejection of a federal jobs bill in the United States Senate that would support teachers and firefighters is an example. In the run up to the vote opponents characterized public sector workers as not “real” workers, assuming the only place real or good things happen is in the private sector.

Similarly, and most dramatically, the lack of oversight of Wall Street has led to directly to our current economic collapse and ongoing malaise. That the perpetrators were not held accountable, indeed accountability was shifted to the poor and minorities whom it was claimed poor bankers were forced to give loans to, takes the tiniest grain of truth and creates a terrible lie, one directed at destroying our sense of mutual responsibility.

Small wonder young people and, increasingly others, have taken to the streets. It is their patriotic duty to do so.

This movement, and movement does appear to be the right word is a call to return to a balanced understanding of our republic. We are in times of great peril. There are those who have forgotten how much we need each other, and how we need to hold each other to account.

Occupy Providence, like other actions of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that call to our better angels.

This call is so important that I hope you will, as you have done so far, allow the encampment to continue unmolested, to allow the continued recalling to all of us of this deep need we have as free individuals bound up together in a great communal experiment to stand together, and to pull together.

I remain yours in solidarity,

(The Rev’d) James Ishmael Ford