I am writing from Philadelphia, where the Occupy National Gathering began on Saturday and will continue through the 4th of July. The purposes of this event, a kind of conference supported by many of the Occupy sites in the USA, include comparing notes on shared concerns of the various Occupations and planning for the future of Occupy. In fact, the National Gathering is to host an all-day “Visioning Process” on July 4th to generate ideas to inform Occupy’s future.

I wonder whether Occupy is dying what may be an inevitable (if drawn out) death, from which something new must and will eventually emerge. I suggest this because of the funk that the movement has generally fallen into since the shutting down of the Occupations last fall across the country by police newly equipped and trained to behave like local armies. Many Occupations continued to work for peace and justice, and raising consciousness about income inequality and related issues, in myriad ways after their eviction from public spaces. (For many examples of these sorts of activities, and especially if you are one of the many otherwise intelligent people who think that Occupy is only “hippies” parading around parks, please peruse the last nine months of updates on the websites or Facebook pages of any of the many Occupations).

But here at the National Gathering, I cannot shake the feeling that the movement is withering. I don’t know how many protesters are here, but I would guess somewhere between 400 and 600, give or take, so far. Many who are here (my impression only) seem to be, understandably, some of the most activist-minded, diehard Occupiers. Middle-aged and senior persons are much less evident than they were last fall. And including children (and therefore parents of school-aged kids) does not seem to be a priority here — again unlike (my experience of) Occupy last fall, when we had encampments and momentum.

And there seems to be too much interest here at the National Gathering (and this objection has been raised about other Occupations) in provoking confrontation with the police. This provocation happens at the cost of making the best of the movement — that it represents an array of the soul-deep grievances of most Americans — invisible to the very people we need to reach, and who were in the process of being reached last fall. The survival of Occupy is utterly dependent on successfully inviting others to consider that most of us are subject to an insane system, in and through “democratic structures,” of corporate influence, militarism, and hostility toward the disadvantaged (from the rise of the prison culture to general indifference toward good and accessible education for all).

At the National Gathering this weekend, there have been several standoffs with the police, leading to multiple arrests and

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