Occupy Austin @ Tumblr

This is the story of how we planned and pulled off the first City of Houston Hackathon. It has an ensemble cast filled with software developers, elected officials, policy wonks, civic innovators, bagels, and bahn mi. And like so many good stories, this one begins at a bar.

Demonstrators upset about Gov. Rick Perry’s refusal to expand Medicaid coverage interrupted his State of the State speech this morning and were quickly hustled from the House Chamber by state troopers.

One man, identified by friends as the Rev. James Caldwell, a Houston community activist, was detained by Capitol security officers after the 11:25 a.m. incident.

He was later escorted in handcuffs from the building, although troopers declined to say whether he would be charged with disorderly conduct or any crime.

More than a dozen other protestors with the Texas Organizing Project, wearing teal-colored t-shirts, were escorted from the statehouse after the outburst in the House Chamber.

Not long after Perry began his State of the State speech, Caldwell stood in the House gallery and shouted:

“Excuse me Governor Perry, but what do you plan to do about the 7 million uninsured in Texas. Why are you turning down the billions of Medicaid expansion funds?”

Other protestors sitting around him began chanting as troopers hustled to the group, and began escorting them out of the chamber. Perry, who had just announced a tax-rebate plan when the protest exploded, went on with his speech.

The House Chamber, standing room only with dignitaries and state officials to hear Perry’s speech, was briefly astir with whispering as the group was led out.

Ginny Goldman, executive director of the organizing project, said the group held a demonstration earlier in the day outside the Capitol. She said the group tried to deliver a 16,000-signature petition to Perry last September seeking to have Texas accept expansion of the federal Medicaid program.

Perry has opposed that expansion.

“People should not be arrested for coming to a public speech and asking a question,” Goldman said.

Gloria Payne, a spokesperson for the group, said members did not come to the Capitol to get arrested, but to highlight the plight of the uninsured millions in Texas.

“Rick Perry has said repeatedly that he will refuse to accept the $78 billion from the federal government to expand Medicaid coverage for hard working Texans,” she said. “This leaves us no choice but to bring it to the governor’s attention directly.”

catmartini:

The Occupy movement addresses power. So does religion, but it does so in conflicting ways. To give an example: it often operates with images of divine authority that echo the powers that be. In ancient times, state religions imagined God as a heavenly monarch, modelled after particular rulers. Today, dominant religion imagines God, often by default, as the boss who calls the shots and rewards religious shareholders. This is not only the message of the so-called Gospel of Prosperity; mainstream churches of all major denominations are found in this camp as well. Who can blame atheists for flagging this kind of theism as the wishful thinking of the status quo?

Yet there are alternative forms of religion, and alternative images of the divine to go with them. The early Christians proclaimed a God who was executed on a cross in solidarity with the people. For this, the Roman elites called them atheists. In the Civil Rights movement, God was conceived as the liberator who challenged oppression and used leaders such as Moses and Martin Luther King to lead the people to freedom.

Jesus himself was a construction worker, and would have been in touch with the many unemployed of his time

In the context of the Occupy movement, fresh images of God are emerging. Some of these images connect us back to ancient and forgotten traditions of liberation, rather like the Civil Rights movement discovering Moses and the labour movement reclaiming Jesus as well as the prophetic traditions. In Occupy, these emerging images might bring us closer to the true nature of the world and of the cosmos than any of the dominant images could.

Dangerously, some Christians in the movement were reminded of where and how Jesus had actually lived. Occupiers camping in the streets could relate to Jesus’ deep solidarity, not with the elites of his time, but with the multitude. Jesus had stayed among those who struggled with life: with the sick, the social outcasts, strong women of ‘dubious’ reputation and working people such as fishermen. He himself was a construction worker, and would have been in touch with the many unemployed of his time, who quite regularly experienced layoffs. Perhaps he was even unemployed himself.

Participants in the Occupy movement could also relate to the way that the divine frequently resists elite agendas. Jesus challenged legalism by healing on the Sabbath. He put the demands of liberation above the law, challenged the myriad uses of religion that kept struggling people down, and defied the conservative impulse to marginalise women and children.

Moreover, he rejected narrow notions of the family — still at the core of conservative politics — and declared that the true bonds of community are not biological but social: ‘whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. Unlike dominant Christianity, Christians involved in the Occupy movement could easily see why Jesus would challenge even the temple, the highest symbol of his religion. Thus the basic tenets of Christian religion take on a new life when seen through the struggles of the Occupy movement, which questioned the powerful and entered into solidarity with the proverbial ‘least of these’.

Some of Occupy’s puzzling features also become clearer in this light: not least, the oft-lamented fact that it did not produce a list of demands. What simple list of demands could Jesus have made to Caesar without turning the tables altogether? This movement is not about reformism — the assumption that the system can be fixed by adjusting a few of its problems — but about a new world where power flows from the bottom up.

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