This is not an objective article designed to explain the motivations and goals of a movement. This is not a manifesto intent on enumerating the causes and ethos of popular sentiment. This is a personal expression. A contemplation of an evolving social climate. A revelation of support. A pondering of potential futures. An editorial, if you will. If you’re disinterested in such radical subjectivity, please, feel free to abandon this page in favor of less honestly subjective journalism.
I have run through the streets of major cities clutching vinegar-soaked bandanas to my face while pepper spray barreled through frantically dispersing crowds of peaceful protesters. I have stared into surveillance cameras unmasked and articulated “fuck you” in a myriad of angry political statements and fist raising determination. I have broken through police lines, dropped banners on highways, wheat pasted stenciled proclamations of revolution to dilapidated storefronts. I have read poetry to protests, sat through excruciating consensus meetings while planning illegal direct actions. And I have been burnt out, disillusioned, pacified.
It’s not that my political inclinations shifted, that I got older and more conservative, or even that I lost my passion for the Struggle. What I became disillusioned with was the nature of protest. It occurred to me that these weekends of demonstration, these nights of clandestine activism, were simply gaskets. They allowed us to vent our rage, our indignation, our discontent, with relatively ineffectual displays of opinion. They were catalysts for change, we felt, in some ways. More often than not, however, they served primarily to allow us to feel we were doing our part in creating a better, more just world, without actually affecting the corrupt structures we were so vehemently dedicated to dismantling.
I attended marches against wars, globalization, the 2004 Republican National Convention, Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights, against baseball stadiums slated to be built on slave burial grounds, rallies for the legalization of marijuana. All these compartmentalized issues, all these events with a single statement. But it was largely the same demographic, if not the same actual group of people, at all of them. And I began to feel that these protests were missing a larger point. They were focusing on symptomatic manifestations of greater, broader, more complicated underlying problems. But, I thought, how do you march for a more humanistic worldview? How do you rally a country around the notion that we should care for each other as we do for ourselves? There’s no anger in that, no defiant chant, no emotive slogan. And I was angry. I was full of chants and slogans.
So I stopped going. This was probably five years ago. I ignored the corporate under-reporting of protests, scoffed at the Tea Partiers and their sudden reversal of the oft-flung accusation that protesters are inherently unpatriotic. I laughed at their conviction that their marches would do anything more than ours had. I wrote a few articles here and there, but my Days of War and Nights of Love had shifted to mostly just nights of love. When I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, I tipped a sympathetic ear, but ignored them too. What’s the point?
But then a funny thing happened. I saw an MSNBC broadcast by Lawrence O’Donnell, in which he railed against the NYPD for the inexcusable brutality they had perpetrated against the protesters in New York City. I began watching more footage of the demonstrations, reading articles, prowling Twitter for #OccupyWallStreet hashtags. And I felt something stir within me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Something I didn’t think existed anymore.
That something, which I am indeed feeling now, is a sense that we are at the brink of incredible change. It is the tidal sensation of a shift in the collective consciousness, the perception of a building momentum, an unstoppable awakening. It is what drab historians might call a “revolutionary fervor.” But this time, it is not spurred by my own blind faith in the righteousness of a shared belief. This time it has been cultivated by reason, supported by intuition, fortified by fact.
Detractors of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Occupy movement in general, will claim it is doomed to failure because of its lack of a clearly stated mission. I believe this is exactly why it will succeed.
The Iraq War demonstrations had a clearly stated mission. The RNC protests had a clearly stated mission. The legalization rallies had a clearly stated mission. They took on one issue, and for the days on which they took place, that one issue became everything.
The true potential of this Occupy movement is its lack of a singularly polarizing rallying point. It is a movement that doesn’t simply want to end a war, or empower a political party; it wants to create a new way of life. It is a demonstration of the capacity of people with divergent interests and causes to come together with the understanding of a larger commonality. It is a movement that says we will be heard, each one of us, because we are the people, and we’re listening to each other. It is a movement that, at its most fundamental level, demands a universal respect for the sanctity of human life. There is a clarity here that was lost on the angst-driven anti-war scene. It is not so much asking for change as creating it.
And therein lies the truly revolutionary potential of the Occupy movement. It is not an unfocused, loose coalition of misguided misanthropes, but rather the expression of the masses that there is something irrevocably wrong with The Way Things Are. It is not deluded into believing one particular issue or political party is the cause of all the world’s problems, and it is not claiming there is an easy fix, but rather than hanging out their windows and screaming, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” they’re doing something about it. We’re doing something about it.
On October 15th, it will be Richmond’s turn, along with hundreds of cities all over the world, to stand in solidarity with those occupying Wall St. We will be standing in solidarity with teachers, Marines, thousands of union workers, students, parents, children, the impoverished and middle class: The People. What’s happening in New York isn’t fizzling out, it’s building momentum, it’s growing. It’s time for us to grow with it.
Because for the first time in years, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.
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There is an organizational meeting for the October 15th demonstration this Thursday, October 6th, at 5:30pm in Monroe Park. Please consider coming out.