After the last bell sounded at work I was asked by a colleague what I'd be up to this weekend. "Music, reading, a little writing; maybe try to head downstate, Occupy Wall Street, ya know?"
Occupy Wall Street's a non-issue at the school where I'm employed. There's this tremendous movement underway now a month, expressing the collective angst of millions. Yet many of the staff, and I suspect the majority of students, are unaware of what's going on. The knowledge is there, of course, that something's happening; what, however, is more difficult for most to pin down.
When the topic emerges from the occasionally tawdry morass of quotidian school issues, it's prefixed and suffixed with the flummox of why? Inquiring minds want to know about their goals. "I support the protests," said one colleague, "but they need to state some goals." Another quipped: "They're a joke. Nobody's taking them seriously. Without demands, what are you to make of 'em?"
These folks are out of touch with history. Providing their stock example - the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s- they told me about how that movement had recognizable leaders with coherent demands. Somehow, through an admixture of how the era is discussed in the grand narrative of our school textbooks and media and entertainment industries, they have managed to isolate the struggle for black rights from those other struggles for the rights of women, workers, the poor, and human rights in general. Although the civil rights movement was a nexus of unrest and collectivization, it was just that, a nexus, out of which energy poured into other sectors of social and political life in the United States.
The Wall Street Occupation is not an end in itself. However I'd like to suggest that from a certain perspective it is one for itself. The occupation, nearly into its sixth week, has been thus far a success that even critics are remiss to deny. Denials can't logically follow discussion, and there's plenty of it, even if at times it seems largely cheap, naïve and dismissive. Whether goals are articulated or not, the expression of collective will on display does one thing remarkably well and with crystalline clarity: it bears witness.
Regardless of which one of the myriad issues you pick to spoon-sample from the pot, their systemic associations are blended so well together even Gordon Ramsey couldn't curse his way into distinguishing the carrot from the celery. Wall Street's the broth into which the ingredients are stirred and from which the stomach-turning aroma pollutes the air.
If you happen to suck up a chunk of Citizens United floating in there, somewhere, balefully in Wall Street ooze, you notice quickly how the attack on public education dollars, state pension funds and social services enhance that particular flavor; or how about when you happen to chance on a soggified tendril that resembles by appearance only the disaster that is healthcare in this country? As soon as you let its flavors settle down for palatial recognition you suddenly realize you're eating the brains of a child and her sister eviscerated under the ballast of a remote controlled predator drone; how about that drone, doesn't it also taste like stagnant wages for those who have managed to retain or find employment, Tort 'reform,' or mercenary armies like Blackwater/Xe making a bundle on the public dime and thirstily sucking the marrow from the bones of the women and children they murder and rape? And those wages, they sure taste and smell a lot like the decline of organized labor, which tastes and smells a lot like the diminution of women's rights and the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, net neutrality, immigration 'reform,' the emasculation of the "job-killing" EPA, the farce of Copenhagen a couple years back and every G8 and G20 the bastards throw for themselves.
The problem with choosing goals lies in how difficult it is to separate one issue from the next. What we are really hearing when folks demand demands and goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement is a request, either conscious or unconscious or uninformed, to pare the strength of our grievances down to manageable, conquerable size. Isn't the request for centralized demands a way of saying, "All right, we hear you. Now get the fuck off the street!"
What in the past has dogged large scale protest efforts has been the inability or the lack of enough vision to unite singular struggles into a comprehensively unified one - He wants toe-may-toes, but I want toe-mah-toes. In the early years of the movements against the Iraq War I was in Washington D.C. and New York with what at times seemed to be hundreds of thousands of others, standing together, marching together, cursing and crying and banging on our drums together. I recall hearing one critique that made some sense: we tended to be there for different reasons, under different front groups and coalitions, each with our particular issue that coalesced roughly around the catastrophic, illegal war. People came together, yes, however they used their own approaches to try to make their voices heard. Those approaches were in some sense determined by the issue that was of most immediate concern, and from one perspective they helped to create and maintain the factions that prevented the movement from realizing its potential.
By demanding that the OWS movement draft and pronounce a list of goals is another way of asking them to choose certain issues over others, which risks the likely outcome of fracturing the movement. Who do we need to please, anyway, by listing our demands in the name of bringing comfort to the confused and ammunition to the threatened and unsettled? Why expedite the process? What's the hurry? We've been in this mess a long time, and it will take time to properly address it. Thankfully, as T.S. Eliot put it:
If critics and skeptics want to figure out what's going on, they ought best get going on their studies.
They can begin with A People's History of the United States.
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