Occupy: on the move

The tents and makeshift kitchen are gone from Grand Circus Park, cleared out by order of city officials in time to keep it from besmirching the festivities surrounding Detroit's nationally televised Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Who wants a bunch of scruffy political malcontents and homeless people drawing attention to the problems of capitalism as the holiday shopping season is about to kick off?

And, unlike occupiers of public spaces in a number of other cities — from New York and Philadelphia to Los Angeles and Portland — the demonstrators peacefully complied, avoiding even the possibility of the mass arrests, police brutality and dramatic television images that occurred elsewhere.

But don't be misled. 

Occupy Detroit's move out of the park wasn't a surrender. It was a decision both practical and tactical. 

With winter approaching, it made little sense to try to tough it out in the park once temperatures began to drop. Moreover, much effort was going into simply surviving: maintaining the camp and feeding anyone who showed up. As one of the occupiers noted, setting about building a political movement is difficult to do when much of your energy is going into running a soup kitchen.

So, when city officials announced it was time to leave, the occupiers, with some heated debate about the importance of fighting to remain in a public space, agreed in their own cumbersome consensus-building way to peacefully vacate the downtown park.

By that point, though, the encampment had already served a crucial purpose: It provided a rallying point for the diverse components of Occupy Detroit to come together.

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