Hope Springs from ‘Non-Meeting’
By Rachel Stewart
Officially, for the record, nothing happened. When members of Occupy Richmond and a local tea-party group got together at a downtown art gallery, it wasn’t exactly a coincidence, but it wasn’t a meeting either.
“I think it’s all very, very important that we state very clearly that this was not a meeting between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement,” one occupier said.
Got it.
Common Ground
Even so, the two groups did end up in the same place, talked, found some common ground—“to return power to the people,” one participant in this non-event said—and no police presence was required. They’d probably have resented the implication that any such governmental supervision might have been necessary or desirable, and rightly so.
All this didn’t occur in early December, though it might well have not taken place earlier, given the fact that these groups do have comparable complaints against the establishment, and one point on which they do express some, for once of a less ideologically freighted word, solidarity.
Show of Support
The occupiers agree that the city owes the tea partiers almost $9,000 they paid for permits to hold a rally in a park where, for more than two weeks, the occupiers camped for free. The occupiers in fact showed up at a recent Richmond City Council meeting to express their support for the tea partiers in their effort to get their money back.
It would be a mistake to read too much into all this non-occurrence, predicting some world-historical convergence of the two groups, especially since they won’t even cop to having met. But it’s a start. Baby steps, people, baby steps.
And it might also be worth noting that they did so under conditions of admirable civility. That decorum is the last thing their many critics would have considered possible just might tell us more about the critics than about the occupiers and tea partiers.
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