Your recently published editorial “The Death of Occupy” highlights the particularly poor journalistic standards of Technician. The piece approved by your editor-in-chief is poorly researched, argued and written.  Moreover it displays a cavalier arrogance, a sense of superiority and a dismissive quality unbecoming of a scholar or a journalist. The most glaring problem to me is how little you know about the Occupy movement or Occupy Raleigh. You “… take issue with the action, or lack of action, being taken.”

A simple Google search brings up www.occupyraleigh.org/calendar which lists actions being taken every day like protests at Crabtree Valley Mall, the governor’s mansion, Art Pope’s house or around the Capital building. You can see a list of our GA meetings and our working group schedule. You can see plans for actions against specific pieces of legislation like our Drum Out Citizen’s United Action or Occupy NCSU’s Defend Education action against tuition hikes coming up on February 10.

You called our continuous occupation stale. Have you ever been to the “triangle,” our campground? Have you sat around the campfire talking politics? Have you seen strangers with different viewpoints come together during a cold night and find common ground? Have you sat in our library, planning actions, making signs and building friendships? Have you seen people turned away from every other option in society find refuge and food in a place formed and maintained by the goodwill and determination of a handful of people despite opposition from the cops and politicians?  

If you had seen the role our campsite plays in awakening people both to an understanding of our political and economic system and to the harsh realities of day to day oppression that creates you would not call it stale.  Are you so in search of novelty, of something new and sensational that you would casually dismiss something as important as a social movement because as you say “We’ve covered it many times in news and on this page, and it’s beginning to wear us down, even annoy us”.

You conclude that Occupy isn’t “actionable,” as opposed to the movement against SB 514.  This is poor analogy; consider Occupy more akin to the entire gay rights movement, an umbrella with many specific elements working towards the common goal of economic justice and an end to political corruption.

In any case, do your readers and yourself justice by properly researching and understanding something before you dismiss it.

Clark Goldentyer

graduate student, mathematics