Occupy DN? It’s not happening

Occupation is sweeping the nation, even if employment is not.

Ever since 200 people set up camp in the heart of New York’s financial district to peacefully protest corporate greed, moneyed influence on government and economic inequality, Occupy Wall Street-inspired groups have cropped up from Mumbai, India, population 12.5 million, to Mosier, Ore., population 435.

But occupation is scarce in Del Norte County, while protests continue as nearby as Arcata.

So why has this global trend skipped our neck of the woods?

The Triplicate asked a few locals to weigh in on this question. Their answers included isolation, the lack of an academic community and rooted Republicanism.

Really, it’s anybody’s guess.

“It’s very hard to organize people here. If I can get 100 people to show up it’s a good event, and I spend eight to 10 hours a day running Democratic politics,” said Debra Broner, chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party.

Fred Otremba is one local who tried to rally occupiers, to little end.

“My intentions were to help organize something and there wasn’t very much public response,” he said. “We did protest about four times downtown at the empty gas station by the CAN food pantry. We did have good response of some of the cars driving by.”

But, ‘honk if you’re occupying’ doesn’t really compare to the 24/7 camps that are now being evicted from parks, bank fronts and civic centers around the country.

Humboldt State University Political Science Professor William Daniel chalked it up to the political make-up here.

College of the Redwoods Student Senator Steven Bevier agreed.

“This is largely a conservative area. We tend to vote conservatively and the occupy movement has been seen as a branch of the liberal side of politics,” Bevier said.

The recent history of the Tea Party in Del Norte County provides a useful foil: another grassroots movement based on widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, but associated with the far right. The Tea Party has gained considerable steam since Sheriff Dean Wilson founded a local chapter in 2009. The group now has 400 county residents on its mailing list and 120 active members, Wilson said.

“I think there’s a lot of the same dissatisfaction, leading to a lot of the same ire and angst that’s causing the rise of the Tea Party and now the occupy movement,” Wilson said. “What’s constantly expressed in both is, ‘When are the people responsible for the 2008 collapse going to come to some kind of justice?’”

Wilson guessed that without a four-year college campus, Del Norte is missing a key ingredient for occupation.

Crescent City resident Richard Miles said, “Most people do not graduate from high school here and that’s a sad fact. We don’t have a large academic community.”

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 17.9 percent of Del Norters never graduated high school, while 78.5 percent never graduated college.

 But as Democratic congressional candidate Norman Solomon put it at a recent campaign stop in Crescent City, “What qualifies someone to be part of the occupy movement is to be able to spell occupy.”

The banner of the movement is inherently inclusive: “We are the 99 percent,” a reference to the disparity in wealth between the richest 1 percent of the country and the rest of the population.

Wilson saw this generality in purpose as a weakness and possibly another reason people here have kept out of the fray.

“You can say, ‘Yeah we are the 99.’ That gets their attention, but then you have to say, ‘What are we doing with this?’ I think it’s always good when people come up and question what the government is doing. Then the question is, what do you do with that?”

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