Editor's note: I received this article from Preston last Friday, and was planning to run it today but it has been somewhat overtaken by events. Nonetheless, I felt that his perspective was valuable, and did a good job of illuminating the overall reasons behind the Occupy movement as it exists here in RVA and in the rest of the world. Therefore, we'll be running this article unaltered, in spite of the fact that some details may now be outdated. Rest assured, though, in one form or another, the Occupy movement will continue to exist in RVA.
“It’s like Woodstock meets Burning Man meets people with absolutely no purpose.”
-Kimberly Guilfoyle, FOX News
Holy shit, I just learned something from FOX News. –Me.
This summer I participated in a social experiment in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. It’s called Burning Man. There were over 50,000 other people there--citizens, if you will--of a city based not on law and commerce, but on ten simple principles. These principles (Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Civic Responsibility, Immediacy, Communal Effort, and Leaving No Trace), create the governing philosophy behind Black Rock City, which is for one week the third largest city in Nevada.
And I’ve already pissed people off. It would stand to reason that if Burning Man wanted media attention, it would be held somewhere more accessible than a brutal alkali flat in the middle of August. Burning Man is not a protest. It is apolitical because it does not engage with the political systems that govern our society. There are people of conscience there, aspiring politicians, and in all likelihood bankers and lobbyists as well. But you are not your job at Burning Man.
Nothing about your default-world life is relevant to Burning Man, unless you decide it should be. And so many “Burners” are resentful of public discussion about the Burner phenomenon outside of their own communities. Nobody wants a modern day Cointelpro designating Black Rock City as ground zero for the next revolution. And it never will be. Burning Man is not commentary on our society; it is its own society. That’s the whole point. So take what I’m imparting here as Radical Self-Expression.
I don’t believe in coincidence. For the first time in its 25 year history, Burning Man reached capacity this year. Ticket sales were halted. Less than two weeks following the event, people started camping in Zuccotti Park.
The concept has spread, and in hundreds of cities all over the world, people are occupying public spaces to protest corruption, greed, and the dehumanizing effect of both. But what I see these various occupations as demonstrating is more the capacity of humans to care for each other, to engage in meaningful discussion, and to feel as though their freedom to speak is a worthwhile right to exercise. It feels weird, doesn’t it, being listened to? We are unaccustomed to this in the frantic fury of soundbytes and corporate media, and the chest-pounding politics of ego and limelight.
There are two things I didn’t see at Burning Man: money and violence. These are the same two things I have not seen at Occupy Richmond’s camp in Kanawha Plaza. And there’s a lot to see here. I’ll save that for the next dispatch.
But the parallels between Burning Man and the Occupy movement are somewhat academic; the growth of both indicates a significant shift in the collective consciousness, but one can only inform the other to the extent that an individual allows them to.
And the Occupy phenomenon is one of the individual. It’s something that regards speech, both internally, as voiced during the nearly unbearable process of modified consensus, and obviously externally, as it is in itself a form of dissent. Occupy Richmond makes its decisions through General Assemblies: open meetings during which various issues ranging from tactics to stated goals are presented. Modified consensus requires that 90% of those in attendance support a proposal before it is ratified by the whole.
If you’ve seen videos of this, it may appear that Occupy Richmond is a disorganized, inarticulate horde of misdirected hostility and uninformed, opinionated pseudo-activists plagued by infighting and a lack of vision. Look closer.
What’s happening here is a democratic process, and despite the (occasionally infuriating) sluggish pace of the decision-making process, it’s one that involves everyone who chooses to participate. The undertakings of congress, an exclusive grouping of elected officials who do this for a living, are so monotonous and complex they are barely monitored by the public, who rely instead on news media for digestible distillations of proposal debates that last for days and only require a simple majority for ratification. Honestly, when was the last time you watched an entire session for yourself?
Which raises the question: if even those of us who are passionately involved with the Occupy movement detest these proceedings, why are we still partaking? It’s certainly not for personal gain, nor is it an indication of some sense of lazy entitlement, as certain news anchors have suggested.
I can only speak for myself. I am here because I believe we have become disconnected from the decision-making processes that govern our country, and the catharsis of barstool debates has resulted in little more than meaningless victories and ideological hangovers. I am here because I believe in the urgent necessity of an American Conversation. I cannot trust someone else to give voice to my opinions on my behalf, and I am not lazy enough to do so. I am not doing this for a living; I am doing this because I am trying to live.
We have claimed to be the 99%. If you want to know what “we” want, stop presenting the question to the one-sided discourse of glassy-eyed TV screens, and start participating in the conversation we’re having. Because there’s no answer. There can’t be. It’s something I took from Burning Man; you simply can’t generalize a gathering based on the notion that the individual is something to be celebrated. What I’m getting at here, is this: if we are the 99%, we cannot claim to be or not be anything (except the 1%). If we are the 99%, we are the 53% too. And if we’re the 99%, we have many problems to address, and we are talking to these problems directly.
Look: We are consciousness and conscience. We are degraded and used. We are pacifists and militants and commentators on the newsreel of our own existence. We are homeless and employed and upwardly mobile. We are hopeful and hopeless. We are hippies, punks, cowboys, lawyers, lawbreakers and law makers. We are artists and poets and jaded journalists without objective silence. We are public servants, socially active, anti-social. We are the military, and the dead civilians at their feet. We are Christians, Quakers, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and Satanists. We are liberals, fascists, communists, socialists, anarchists, and republicans. We are the empty eyes of bus passengers on the night’s last route. We are dusty and fresh off the road from Burning Man, and other stereotyped metropolises it’s simply easier not to understand.
We are creating community, destroying society, and out for the subtle transfusions of shaking hands. We are the hard hats and bureaucrats. We are the unhanded generation of anti-depressants, writing sonatas and tragedies, scripts and prescriptions. We are the sons of bankers and orphans of dreams that ended, leaving us crying and holding guns. We are meditating, medicating, birthing and dying, and screaming truth when we’re lying.
99%, we are in prisons and parks and offices, hunched over the shallow grave of deep fryers, innocent, guilty, guiltless. We are the gluttony of hunger strikes. 99%, we are everyone. We are any damn thing anyone wants to say about us because we are all of the problems and solutions anyone faces. And we are finding a new way to live with each other. We are everything wrong with America and the only ones who can fix it. Don’t you see? That’s why they’re scared, and sneering, and sitting so high in these vast buildings. We are everything they say and nothing they’ve said. They’re scared that we know who we are. They are scared of themselves and what they’ve created on the ground, because sooner or later, they’ll have to come down.
So listen to me, you bastards! We are the illegitimate children of your copulating currency, dirty as money and fuck. We are the mess you created. We are not asking you to clean it up, you understand us only with prisons and guns and things you can chart. We don’t want your handouts or help, we want you to get the hell out of our way, because the only things we are not are the ones who started this.