I didn't pay as much attention as I should have to the events in Egypt and elsewhere, but didn't they take more than a month or two to accomplish their goals?Well, OWS isn't trying to overthrow the government, they have a much more diffuse goal. One that would take a long time to implement.
Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.To digress and then return.
"We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer."A million times, this.
But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.Well here's the problem. I would trust the movement and their potential high-profile allies like Krugman, Kristof and Spitzer to make sure that the criminals of the financial crisis are put to justice and to set up new rules so hundreds of billions don't just get swindled again, if that's what the movement set out to do. But I could never trust the movement to fix 'everything' that's wrong in this society.
Why does it matter if homeless are in the camps? In a way, being homeless is like a permanent, involuntary protest. They're still people, and their opinions still matter.I didn't say it was a bad thing, but it's obviously going to increase the problem rate.
For O.W.S., though, there is danger ahead. Winter is coming. The strategy of static outdoor encampments is straining the patience even of sympathetic mayors in cities like Oakland, where last week riot police stormed the site and a Marine veteran was left in critical condition. If the weather and the cops pare the numbers in the camps, it’s far from unimaginable that ideologues in the mold of the Old New Left—people for whom the problem is “capitalism” per se, as opposed to a political economy rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of the rest—could end up dominant. As it is, the Occupiers’ brand of romantic participatory democracy can too easily render their decision-making vulnerable to a truculent few. In the most notorious example, Representative John Lewis, the revered civil-rights hero, was prevented from speaking at Occupy Atlanta—not because the crowd didn’t want to hear from him (the great majority did, as they signalled, in the movement’s semaphore language, with raised hands and wiggling fingers) but because one man clenched his fists and crossed his forearms, thereby exercising a consensus-breaking “block.” A vegan filibuster, you might say. The pollsters tell us that Americans like O.W.S.’s essential message. They like the Occupiers, too—not as much as they like the message, but more than they like the Tea Party. But if the pressures of hypothermia, frustration, and correcter-than-thou one-upmanship converge to push them toward more provocative, less mellow forms of civil disobedience—“occupying” a nice warm state capitol building, for example—the messengers will mess up the message. And the public will cross its fists.I'm not sure how to influence what happens here. It seems like it's time for some corollary meme to encampments to develop - living-room listening or discussion circles a la early Obama campaign, for instance. Or 99% forums at libraries. Teach-ins (I love the lecture series-es at the encampments. Fantastic stuff). Some form of grassroots-level community discussion in which - like the protestors - are not proselytizing for any ideology or stumping for any candidate, but looking straight on at the situation and talking about what it means for us. I don't have the concept but I am ready to try something.
Occupy suburban bedroom community housing developments and commuter train stations. (I'm only half-joking.)Quite the prognosticator:
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As long as it remains a crime to ever counter any encroachment by police forces in any way, we're going to find it difficult to shake the country loose from its current path. Maybe if enough people massed in movement against the system we'd find those threats falling by the wayside. Sadly, so many have bought into the system, even unthinkingly, that I'm not sure it could ever happen.
posted by hippybear at 11:12 AM on November 13, 2011 [46 favorites]