As cities get fired up for the coming months and camps begin “spring training,” the small camp in my town folded its tents.  What I was hopeful and excited about as a vision of Occupy’s future, became a short-lived failure that missed its mark both within the camp and with the surrounding community.  Why?  The question must be asked and answered if Occupy is going to reach all 99%.

Struggling with the complaints of area businesses who claimed to be suffering in an already fragile economy and an even more fragile location, the borough passed an ordinance banning the tents from the small center pavilion.  One tent and its single Occupant, rumored to be a vagrant who was using his Occupier’s voice and labors to advocate for the election of a write-in Democrat (running against a local Democratic incumbent), moved to a small park way out of sight, on the other side of town.  A statement released by the Occupancy stated that the camp was moved “due to a fear of tents” expressed by the director of local “’farmers’ style market.”  Disappointed by the slander and put off by the political motives that seemed to underline the camp’s activities, I’m attempting to withhold personal judgment on the camp and instead focus on what went wrong with a small town occupation that should have set up a model for the spread of the movement.

Sitting in a local business, I overheard some community members talking about the Occupation, noticing that it was gone.  One woman commented that she was not sure why they set up camp here in the first place, “after all, this isn’t a corporate center or anything.  There aren’t any big businesses or even banks with bad reputations around here.”

The issue of people not understanding the presence or point of Occupy is one of our biggest problems, whether in a small town or a huge city.  While the overall message of Occupy is one that is generally heard, the smaller works of our camps are being missed by those we need to reach.  In urban settings, it is easier to find projects to get involved in because the problems plaguing American cities are clear and numerous.  Occupy has fed the homeless, cleaned up trash, beautified vacant lots, and so forth.  In small towns, however, the problems are not so glaring.  Picking up small amounts of litter that blow out of sidewalk trash cans isn’t going to cut it as “community service.”  Small town occupations simply have to develop new and finely tuned strategies for outreach and support.

From major cities to small town America, the impact of camps on local businesses puts Occupy at immediate odds with those they are intending to help: the common citizen, and hence, small business owners.  Even taverns that bordered Zuccotti Park in the great tourism capital of New York City complained of the incredible impact the camp’s existence had on their business.  What protesters see as an acceptable loss, a casualty of war, local business owners see as counter-intuitive and extremely personal, putting at odds two groups that should be united in their vision of an improved nation.  Setting up special working groups to communicate with local business owners in close proximity to camps might help ease relations, control undesirable effects of camps, and build bridges between campers and business owners that can turn into powerful alliances for both.

Another common complaint about the occupation in our town was that there was never anyone there.  The camp consisted of about six tents, but when people would approach the camp, there was rarely a camper to be found.  In fact, one local reporter shouted into vacant tents and sat around for more than an hour before giving up on interviewing Occupiers for her story.  What is the point of tents if not to house people?

As we learned when the camps in Zuccotti were rolled up by police last fall and Occupy Wall Street answered with the biggest march of their campaign, you don’t need tents to Occupy a location.  Occupying is a lot about possessing a space, but that space is often more inside our heads than in an actual geographic location.  We cannot allow our mission to obtain a physical space become our purpose or our mission.  Our mission is to occupy the minds of people around the world, to occupy the headlines in an effort to promote our social messages, and to occupy the political spectrum with the goal of changing the game that is rigged against us.

If camps, large or small, fail to see the meet local objectives they will never meet the movement’s goals.  Occupy cannot and will not achieve anything without the support of the people.  We can battle it out against the police.  We can tolerate the elements.  We can withstand the hours of legal drama after arrests.  What we cannot do is continue to spread a message to people who are no longer listening, and the quickest way to deafen an ear is to never stop talking.

Conversation is a two-way street.  Problem solving is based on hearing all parts of the problem.  Direct democracy is about respecting everyone’s voices.  And revolution is about changing the whole game, not just one part of it.

As a movement, we need to see the common denominator (hyperlink), the root cause that connects all of our issues and attack it at its root.  Small businesses in Jenkintown (and every town) struggle because the odds are stacked against them.  Why is Jim struggling to get the loan he needs to fix up and rent his building on the corner?  Why is patronage at the Main Street Market down when grocery sales at Wal-Mart soar?  Why does it seem like the local politicians are working against us?

Occupy isn’t only about occupying.  It’s about healing, uniting, and educating.  None of those things are going to come out of empty tents.  If we aren’t going to “Occupy” these communities with proactive and productive activism, we may just as well hang signs on our foreheads that read: vacancy.