Fighting the good fight, in the rain and cold

21 Oct

Last night, after delivering some much needed tent pegs, toilet roll, lip balm, a couple of cans of soup, some pudding and a warm blanket (sorry guys that’s all I could get my hands on for now) I stuck around for the general assembly at the Occupy Edinburgh demonstration in St Andrews Square. I had handed out some leaflets, had a chat with a banker chap, taken some photos and now felt like I deserved a say in their democratic process. As it turned out I only waved my hands in agreement to some things but never quite felt the need to pipe up and say anything (more on the hand waving later). There was a discussion at one point about how well they were communicating as a group and from what I could gather a majority of people thought they were doing alight – I’d have to agree.

Here’s ‘chair person’ Kim at the beginning of a meeting she later told me was ‘hard work, harder than usual’.
Hey, Kim, ya did good! No one said revolution would be easy.

Take note of the people with hands in the air – this is their silent means of communication. For someone who didn’t really know what was going on it would be pretty easy to pick up; wave your hands to agree with something; let them flop downwards from the wrist and wave them to disagree with something; make an ‘X’ with your arms to strongly oppose something; make a ‘P’ with your hands to propose something; a couple of rounds of this and you would get the idea. From what I could tell the methods of communication were pretty closely based on the hand signals being used in the Occupy Wall Street movement in America (see vid at bottom of post).

Below are some photo’s – not the best, I’m sorry – it was dreich to say the least. Below the photos is a video from Wall Street where some of the hand signals are explained as well as a good chance to see ‘The Human Megaphone’ in action, a communication device that it would be great to have necessitated in Edinburgh.