Occupy Rural: The Small Towns Creating Their Own Occupy Protests

A waxing moon rises in the East as protesters start to assemble, fishing signs out of the back of a pickup truck. ‘Honk if you’re the 99%’ ‘End bank lies’ ‘Foreclose on corporate greed’ The wind whips up, snatching pamphlets for the local credit unions and sending organisers scattering after them, and the security bank in front of the Bank of America branch watches with a studied expression as passing cars honk in solidarity.

Fort Bragg, California, is exactly the sort of town many urban residents write off as nonessential and irrelevant, with a population of approximately 7,000 living within city limits. Struggling with an economic depression since the closure of the local lumber mill, the city has been hit hard by the recession, as the growing numbers of vacant businesses on Main Street attest. It doesn’t have enough residents to furnish a full-time campout downtown, and makes do with weekly protests at the farmers’ market on Wednesdays and in front of the conveniently side-by-side Chase and Bank of America branches on Friday afternoons.

‘I’m angry at the banks,’ one man tells me.

‘I just wanted my son to see this,’ says a woman with close-cropped hair.

‘I spent some time at the protests in Oakland, but I live here,’ says another man.

‘This is my first protest,’ as US Navy veteran says. He talks about fearing that none of his absentee ballots were mailed in during his service in Afghanistan. ‘The place we were is so remote that we didn’t even get mail sometimes.’

Yet, protest is not unfamiliar for Fort Bragg and the surrounding region, known as the Mendocino Coast. In 1990, Redwood Summer led thousands of organisers and protesters to descend upon Northern California, including Fort Bragg, to save the redwoods. Protesters have been peppersprayed during environmental actions, have chained themselves to trees to prevent logging. Agitators routinely hold marches and demonstrations, including in the famous Fourth of July parade held in the neighbouring town of Mendocino each year. The rural Occupy movement is alive and well, and Fort Bragg is part of a thriving movement that gets scant media attention even as most major publications are starting to take urban protest seriously.

Diane McEachern’s Occupy the Tundra has gotten some coverage as an ‘oddly enough’ news item, Steph Larsen is Occupying the Pasture in Nebraska, and OccupyRural has sprung up as a central resource. From Mosier, Oregon to West Plains, Missouri, rural populations in the US are turning out to join the movement.

Rural regions of the United States are heavily maligned—hayseeds and hicks just fallen off the turnip truck, are the prevailing attitudes, and it’s common to see urbanites assuming that rural communities have nothing to offer. Yet, many of the issues being brought up by the Occupy movement are of central concern to people in rural areas, who bank, pay taxes, attempt to buy real estate, and live in the United States just like their urban counterparts. In rural communities, there’s much discussion of smug city dwellers and their dismissive, sneering attitudes, and how that deconstructs solidarity.

Economic depression has settled heavily over many rural regions in the US. It’s increasingly difficult to muster enough money to buy, expand, or start a farm, leading to dwindling numbers of family farmers, fewer local sources of food, more conglomerates and corporatisation of food sources. Along with Occupy, many urban protesters are arguing, should come food justice, and that’s something that matters acutely in many rural communities, where people live in food deserts while having inadequate access to health care and nutrition education.

The cost of corporate banking is high for rural communities, which started losing their community banks over a decade ago as major firms began gobbling up smaller financial institutions. Along with corporate ownership comes new policies, and a shift in lending and banking practices that makes it harder for rural residents to get by; money is fleeing rural communities and becoming concentrated in urban areas, an acute problem in many areas that lack funds to provide even basic civil services, let alone respond to disasters or handle acute financial need.

Poverty is heavily concentrated in the rural US, which means it’s essential to be including rural communities in class discussions, but they’re often left out. Rural communities are attempting to make themselves heard with protests that may only garner a handful of attendees who occupy a street corner for a few hours before returning to their jobs, and who struggle with general assemblies that may follow unfamiliar and new formats, attempting to transfer the format popularised at Zucotti Park to their own communities.

At the Occupy Mendocino general assembly, a mixture of seasoned activists, including many Redwood Summer participants, and newcomers had trouble organising the stack and operating by consensus. The room hummed with excitement and a pile of signs by the door registered irritation with everything from offshore oil drilling to corporate greed. There was a vigorous argument about the wording on a flier. People talked over each other.

Rural organising at work. The same community members turn out to provide support and assistance for disasters large and small, to organise collective responses. There’s an air of familiarity mixed with the solidarity. Not just part of a movement, but part of a community. They know each other well and move around each other in a coordinated ballet. They care about the same things they do in Boston, Chicago, New York, Oakland, and they will turn out in frigid wind on a Friday afternoon to tell the world about it even though the world may not be watching.

‘I don’t understand why we don’t just operate by majority,’ someone said. Someone else rolled her eyes and shuffled her feet. Impatient meeting attendees began drifting towards the door, forcing the suggestion to break into committees to keep people focused. A plethora of committees quickly consolidated to organise, a few natural leaders emerging—the same people who are at every protest, organising every event. The heart of the rural Occupy movement.

Organising in rural areas requires a different kind of coordination than that used in the city; the Internet is less reliable, people may be driving an hour or more along remote roads to reach protest sites. Rural Occupiers lack the numbers, the momentum, and the media support of urban protests, but they’re no less committed.

‘Join us,’ the veteran’s sign says.