The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (34 page)

The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizens occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks. Egyptians and others elsewhere on the planet called a local pizza parlor and sent pies to the occupiers. We all know the links. We’re all watching. So the Occupy movement has spilled over from Wall Street. Hundreds of occupations are happening all over North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, in Victoria and Fort Lauderdale.

THE 99%

“We are the 99%” is the cry of the Occupy movement. This summer one of the flyers that helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protest read: “We, the 99%, call for an open general assembly Aug 9, 7:30 pm at the Potato Famine Memorial NYC.” It was an assembly to discuss the September 17 occupation-to-come.

The Irish Hunger Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland remained a food-exporting country and the landed gentry continued to profit. It’s a monument to the exploitation of the many by the few, to the forces that turned some of our ancestors—including my mother’s four Irish grandparents—into immigrants, forces that are still pushing people out of farms, homes, nations, regions.

The Irish famine was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are crises not of scarcity, but of distribution. The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known and has an
abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food—so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution. Everyone could have everything they need and the rich would still be rich enough, but you know that
enough
isn’t a concept for them. They’re greedy, and their thirty-year grab for yet more has carved away at what’s minimally necessary for the survival and dignity of the rest of us. So the Famine Memorial couldn’t have been a more appropriate place for Occupy Wall Street to begin.

The 99%, those who starve during famines and lose their livelihoods and homes during crashes, were going to respond to the 1% who had been served so well by the Bush administration and by the era of extreme privatization it ushered in. As my friend Andy Kroll reported at TomDispatch of the first ten years of the millennium, “The top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade.” He added, “In 2010, 20.5 million people, or 6.7% of all Americans, scraped by with less than $11,157 for a family of four—that is, less than half of the poverty line.” You can’t get by on less than $1,000 a month in this country where a single visit to an emergency room can cost your annual income, a car, twice that, and a year at a private college, more than four times that.

Later in August came the website started by a twenty-eight-year-old New York City activist,
we are the 99 percent,
to which hundreds daily now submit photographs of themselves. Each of them also testifies to the bleak conditions they find themselves in, despite their hard work and educations which often left them in debt, despite the promises dangled before them that (if they played the game right) they’d be safe, housed, and living a part of that oversold dream.

It’s a website of unremitting waking nightmares, economic bad dreams that a little wealth redistribution and policy changes would eliminate (even without eliminating the wealthy). The people contributing aren’t asking for luxuries. They would simply prefer not to be worked to death like so many nineteenth-century millworkers, nor to have their whole world come crashing down if they get sick. They want to survive with dignity, and their testimony will break your heart.

Mohammed Bouazizi, dead at twenty-six, you to whom I’m writing, here is one of the recent posts at that site:

I am 26 years old. I am $134,000 in debt. I started working at 14 years old, and have worked Full-Time since I turned 20. I work in I.T. and got laid off in July 2011. I was LUCKY, and found a job RIGHT AWAY: with a Pay Cut and MORE HOURS? Now, I just found out that my Dad got laid off last week—after 18 YEARS with the same employer. I have debilitating (SP! Sorry!) O.C.D. and can’t take time away from work to get treatment because I can’t afford my mortgage payments if I don’t go to work, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my NEW job if I take time off!!! WE ARE THE 99%.

Some of the people at
we are the 99%
offer at least partial views of their faces, but the young IT worker quoted above holds a handwritten letter so long that it obscures his face. Poverty obscures your face too. It obscures your talents, potential, even your distinctive voice; and if it goes deep enough, it eradicates you by degrees of hunger and degradation. Poverty is a creation of the systems against which people all over the planet are revolting this wild year of 2011. The Arab Spring, after all, was also an economic revolt. What were all those dictatorships and autocracies for, if not to squeeze as much profit as possible out of subjugated populations—profit for rulers, profit for multinational corporations, profit for that 1%.

“We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers” was the slogan of the first student protest called in Spain this year. Your beautiful generation, Mohammed Bouazizi, has arisen and is bringing the rest of us along, even here in the United States.

THE PEOPLE’S MICROPHONE

Its earliest critics seemed to think that Occupy Wall Street was a lobbying group whose chosen task on this planet should be to create a package of realistic demands. In other words, they were convinced that the occupiers should become supplicants, asking the powerful for some kind of handout like college debt forgiveness. They were suggesting that a dream as wide as the sky be stuffed into little bottles and put up for sale. Or simply smashed.

In the same way, they wanted this movement to hurry up and appoint
leaders, so that there would be someone to single out and investigate, pick off, or corrupt. At heart, however, this is a leaderless movement, an anarchist movement, catalyzed by the grace of civil society and the hard work of the collective. The Occupy movement—like so many movements around the world now—is using general assemblies as its form of protest and process. Its members are not facing the authorities, but each other, coming to know themselves, trying to give rise to the democracy they desire on a small scale rather than merely railing against its absence on a large scale.

These are the famous Occupy general assemblies in which decisions are made by consensus and, in the absence of amplification (by order of the New York City police), the people’s mike is used: those assembled repeat what is said as it’s said, creating a human megaphone effect. This is accompanied by a small vocabulary of hand gestures, which help people participate in the complex process of a huge group having a conversation.

In other words, the process is also the goal: direct democracy. No one can hand that down to you. You live direct democracy in that moment when you find yourself participating in civil society as a citizen with an equal voice. Put another way, the Occupiers are not demanding that something be given to them but formulating something new. That it involves no technology, not even bullhorns, is itself remarkable in this wired era. It’s just passionate people together—and then Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, text messages, emails, and online sites like this one spread the word, along with some print media, notably the
Occupied Wall Street Journal
.

The beauty and the genius of this movement in this moment is that it has found a way to define its needs and desires without putting limits on them that would exclude many. In doing so, it has spoken to nearly all of us.

There is the terrible rage at economic injustice shared by college students looking at a future of debt and overwork, as well as those who couldn’t afford college in the first place, by working people struggling ever harder for less, by the many who have no jobs and few prospects, by people forced out of their homes by the games banks play with mortgages and profits, and by everyone affected by the catastrophe that is health care in this country. And by the rest of us, furious on their behalf (and on our own).

And then there is the joyous hope that things could actually be different. That hope has been fulfilled a little in the way that an open-ended occupation has survived four weeks and more and turned into hundreds of Occupy actions around the country and marches in almost 1,000 cities around the world last Sunday, from Sydney to Tokyo to Santa Rosa. It speaks for so many; it speaks for the 99%; and it speaks clearly, so clearly that an ex-Marine showed up with a hand-lettered sign that said, “2nd time I’ve fought for my country, 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

The climate change movement showed up at Occupy Wall Street, too. What’s blocking action on climate change is what’s blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what’s at stake is quarterly earnings.

In a YouTube video of the New York occupation, I watched an old woman in a straw hat say, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” What a beautiful summation! Could any demand be clearer than that? And could the ways in which people have no value under our current economic regime be more obvious?

WHAT IS YOUR OCCUPATION?

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy together. Occupy New Orleans, Portland, Stockton, Boston, Las Cruces, Minneapolis.
Occupy
. The very word is a manifesto, a position statement, and a position as well. For so many people, particularly men, their occupation is their identity, and when a job is lost, they become not just unemployed but no one. The Occupy movement offers them a new occupation, work that won’t pay the bills, but a job worth doing. “Lost my job, found an occupation,” said one sign in the crowd of witty signs.

There is, of course, a bleaker meaning for the word
occupation
, as in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. National Public Radio gives the Dow Jones report several times a day, as though the rise and fall of the stock market had not long ago been decoupled from the rise and fall of genuine measures of well-being for the 99%. Wall Street has long occupied us as if it were a foreign power.

Wall Street
is
a foreign country—and maybe an enemy country as well.
And now it’s occupied. The way that Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for eighteen months four decades ago and galvanized a national Native American rights movement. You pick some place to stand, and when you stand there, you find your other occupation—as a member of civil society.

In Ohio this May, a group of activists dressed as Robin Hood literally lowered a drawbridge they made so they could cross an actual moat around Chase Bank’s headquarters and invade its shareholders’ meeting. Forty Robin Hoods also showed up en masse last week in kayaks for a national mortgage bankers’ meeting in Chicago. Houses facing foreclosure are being occupied. Foreclosure is, of course, a way of turning people into non-occupants.

At this moment in history, occupation should be everyone’s occupation.

BABY PICTURES OF A REVOLT

Young man whose despair gave birth to hope, no one knows what the future holds. When you set yourself afire almost ten months ago, you certainly didn’t know, nor do any of us know now, what the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring will be, let alone this American Fall. Such a movement arrives in the world like a newborn. Who knows its fate, or even whether it will survive to grow up?

It may be suppressed like the Prague Spring of 1968. It may go through a crazy adolescence like the French Revolution of 1789 and yet grow beyond its parents’ dreams. Radiant at birth, wreathed in smiles, it may become a stolid bourgeois citizen as did such movements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the reunited Germany after civil society freed those countries from totalitarianism in 1989.

It may grow up into turbulence as has the Philippines since its 1986 revolution ousted the kleptocracy of the Marcos family. Revolution may be assassinated young, the way the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh was in Iran in 1953, that of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and President Salvador Allende’s Chilean experiment on September 11, 1973—all three in CIA-backed military coups. On behalf of the 1%.

Whether it’s a human child or a child of history, we can’t know who or what it will become, but it’s still possible to grasp something about it by asking who or what it resembles. What does Occupy Wall Street look like? Well, it’s similar to its siblings born around the world this year, of course, and perhaps in some way to the American civil rights movement that began in the 1950s.

There was a national uprising in the United States no less spontaneous in its formation during the Long Depression of the 1870s, but the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was violent, while the Occupy movement is deeply imbued with the spirit and tactics of nonviolence. The Great Depression, the one that began in 1929, created a host of radical movements, as well as the Hoovervilles of homeless people. There are family resemblances. The marches and actions against the coming invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003, on all seven continents (yes, including Antarctica) are clearly kin. The anti-corporate globalization movement is a godmother. And then there’s a sibling just a decade older.

COUSIN 9/11

Zuccotti Park is just two blocks from Wall Street and also just a block from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attack. On that day, it was badly damaged. This September 21, my dear friend Marina Sitrin wrote me from Occupy Wall Street: “There are people from more diverse backgrounds racially, more diverse age groups, including not just a few children here with their parents, and a number of working people from the area. In particular, some of the security guards from the 9.11 memorial, a block away have been coming by for lunch and chatting with people, as has a local group of construction workers.”