We are the Occupiers!

We are the Ointment Flies!

Why the heavy-handed police response?

Let’s not be too surprised at the overreactions of the police agencies. They are merely the puppets of the power brokers, the bankers, and the corporate villains. And these latter are not known for their measured responses.

It is their paranoia, for example, that has us all going through invasive strip-searches and subject to voyeuristic technologies run by high school dropouts with badges. And all this because one (1! As in, A Single Person) among the millions who fly every year, tried (and spectacularly failed) to detonate his underwear on a plane. I am tempted to believe that it’s all a massive fear scam perpetuated on the American people in order to direct tax money toward the companies that manufacture the naked photo machines, and train the airport gropers. But I don't think there's that kind of conspiracy here. Rather, I think that these insular career politeaucrats (bless their little, black hearts) and their puppets who are sworn to “serve and protect” truly believe that there is a monster under "our" (that is, America's) beds and in our closets.

Now the monster is in the Occupations. It is disguised as singing, chanting, and righteous anger at systems of deception, rapacity, and destruction. I don’t think our politeaucrats could tell you what the monster really is, what it looks like, what it might do, or even what makes it a monster. They only know that it has an 11 o’clock curfew, and shouldn't be allowed to set up a tent.

Occupations as Incubators, I

(I first published this on my Facebook page 26 October 2011.)

Occupations are incubators for the new ideas, new values, new human relationships, new ways of being that we are daring to make, discover, and nurture. These protective environments are necessary, for all new life is vulnerable. And what is most dangerous to this new life is simply the old ways, the old life, which so often tries to kill the new, because it sees its own mortality in even the most peaceful, loving, and life-affirming of the new. 

Incubation and gestation is, I think, strongly connected to the idea of a discursive commons (not quite a public sphere) that recalls Aristotle's notion of the polis. Crucial for his notion of the polis is the certainty among the citizens themselves that they are "all in it together." There is no opting out, or simply finding another "interest group" or collective. There was, of course, no notion of the virtual community. One was a member of the community simply owing to geography - you were a citizen of the city-state that you occupied. People rarely moved, and even if they did, citizenship could not be easily acquired. So you had to do your political work with the people you lived with. This required the kind of consensus-building work and investment in process that we are rediscovering in the Occupations today. People cannot simply opt out and find a new citizenry to join and new systems to become part of, because we are all enmeshed in the same systems. (This re-imagining takes a particularly painful turn in America owing to the ways in which the Frontier has been part of our psychological landscape since our birth.)

The global village is, I claim, becoming a global polis. And that polis is responding to worldwide catastrophes of environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, human and animal exploitation, financial system collapse, and political corruption. And these are all causing profound critiques of the assumptions that underlie human systems. We know that our current systems of understanding ourselves and our world not only do not work anymore, but that they are the very systems that created and reproduce our crises. There is no piecemeal re-jiggering, no simple adjustment to the machinery. Any thread that we pull in one place can unravel something in some location around the world. So we build consensus not merely with the people down the street, but with the sweatshop laborers in Jamaica, or the plastic water bottle recyclers in India, or the indigenous people’s land rights claimants in Quebec. And we build consensus with those not yet born, those who will inherit our ways of knowing and acting, as well as our systems and planet.

That consensus building can no longer ignore fundamental questions of the Good. As for Aristotle, no question of policy, procedure, fairness, (or in modernity, of rights) can be asked until we have also asked questions about the Good. These questions are fragile. They make us vulnerable, and threaten our intellectual grasp on our world. We discover that we’ve been doing it all wrong for so long, and that this has destroyed our planet, our fellow human beings, and ourselves. We must grieve for our loss, and recognize our own complicity in these crimes. This too makes us vulnerable. And this vulnerability makes it necessary for us to work with one another in this incubator space.

 

Why we don't have an Occupation site yet

I submit that one significant reason we don't have a greater level of support for an occupation is that many of us don't really know why we need an occupation. I include myself. Sure, it would show solidarity with the Occupy Wall St. group, and provide some geographical center for whatever it is that we imagine we're doing here, but are these reasons enough? If we as a group were already sure we wanted a site, we'd have no trouble simply taking a site, and accepting the risks and inconveniences entailed.

Here are two ways of thinking about why we need an occupation, and how willing we will be to actually occupy.

1. One way of determining the meaning of an occupation site is to see its importance or meaning to three groups:
1.  Ourselves. We might ask: What can we do on site that we can’t do online, or with weekly rallies?
2. Hostile outsiders, like the city and corporations. What will it mean to these groups that we are occupying a site? What will we show them about who we are and what we want? What might it show them about their perpetual environmental/economic/political brinksmanship?
3. Friendly outsiders like other occupations, and the 99% we’re trying to appeal to. What will it mean to these groups that we have a site?
2. Who will be willing to actually occupy? And not just in good weather. Not just when you can spare a few hours. Who is willing to get your body in that space even when no official meeting or action is called? Assuming that we cannot find a “legal” site, will you be willing to be arrested, to go to jail in your determination to occupy? No one can answer these questions for you.

We don't know why we need a site because we haven't spent enough time understanding the first point: what this occupation would do for ourselves. This group has been largely formed in imitation of something we admired when we looked east to New York City. That’s a good start, but we haven't yet made it our own. Perhaps a site really isn't essential to what we are trying to do here. (I think it's essential, but I don't claim to speak for all or even most people here.) Perhaps much can be accomplished through rallies, marches, and General Assemblies. An occupation seems only like a good idea to most people here. Only when we know that it is essential to our struggle, our humanity, only when it becomes the crucial first step in our united redress of grievances, and in our imagining a new world, will we occupy. We must want that site more than we want comfort, for it will be quite uncomfortable. We must want that site more than we want convenience, for a 24-hour occupation will certainly inconvenience us. We must want that site more than we want security, for we will be putting ourselves at risk of arrest or even violence.

Are we ready to be made truly uncomfortable and inconvenienced, ready to put our bodies at risk? Are we ready to begin something that we have never done before? Are we ready for having to depend upon one another? If we are not, then we need to accept that we just thought an occupation was a nice idea, but that we're just not up to the struggle for the dignity, humanity, and justice that we claim we want. And that would be a sad realization.

Occupation ~ polis

What we are seeing in the Occupy gatherings is a true polis as Aristotle imagined it. These people are gathered here to ask basic questions: What is good for our society? Contemporary “political” discourse is not political at all, in the true sense of the term. For it never engages with what is good for society, but only with questions of efficiency, or expediency, or affordability, or “social contracts.” And it is fundamentally reflexive: it originates no questions of its own, but only responds to perceived threats – to borders, to markets, to vague moral positions, to identities, etc. All of these are, more properly, derivative issues. Even the question of rights is derivative, and cannot be meaningfully broached until we have a sense of what rights are meant to do, how they are supposed to function, in this imagined society. The polis is a space in which to ask, What kind of society do we want to create?

Such a question asked today will of course engender the kind of noise we are hearing out of the Occupy Wall Street people. And by “noise” I don’t mean to imply that it isn’t meaningful. Rather, it contains too many meanings for a single ear to comprehend. It’s hard for us to impose any recognizable structure on it, or detect a syntax that would make it recognizable as language or music to our modern ears. And it is no wonder that they speak in many voices and are concerned with many injustices. For it is the nature of true political discourse that it arise out of the individual living conditions that each one of us creates and suffers. Let’s keep listening to these Occupiers. They are learning how to ask fundamental questions about our society, to imagine something new that has never been seen before. And we are learning how to hear them, perhaps for the first time in our own lives.

Occupy and Be

Many people within the Occupation keep pushing the Occupiers to articulate coherent demands. They are concerned with solidarity, legibility, and with productivity. Without demands, they claim, we will not be a unified group, will not be able to recruit new members or retain the attention of the various media, and will not actually make any of the changes we are so desperate to make. I think they have some genuine concerns, but I wonder if they are moving too quickly.

The solidarity of demands is a solidarity of ideas and principles, perhaps, but this is not the same as being a community of people. When the primary connections we have with each other are based upon definite political, social, legislative, or economic demands and exchanges, the possibility of connecting with one another as human beings becomes much more difficult. From what I have been hearing and feeling, people have joined together here out of frustration and anger and fear and desperation, and, importantly, also out of hope. The kids here aren't just frustrated because they don’t think they’ll get what they want and need. They’re frustrated because they’re facing a world that doesn’t want what they have to give. All human beings are equipped to respond to need, to suffering. And this is good. Biologically speaking, we are the most fragile, dependent organism on the planet. Helping and caring - even about strangers - is so deeply instinctive that it can only be overcome with years of training. (cue: No Child Left Behind and capitalist ideology around the "ethos of greed") No generation in history has been so thoroughly "educated." But something's amiss. Something didn't take among many of these students, and it's now coming to the surface.

Their whole lives this generation has been fussed over and told they were special. And what does it all amount to? Now they are being told to put their specialness to good use by being acquisitive, greedy, selfish. “Become part of the system, and success will follow.” Do they want success? Perhaps they detect the scarcity and isolation implicit in the very notion of success. And so they are beginning to rebel not only against this system, but against their own training. “We’ve been duped! They only told us we were special so that we would feel deserving of all the consumer crap they push on us.” They are tired of being told what to want, and not being given an opportunity to lend assistance, to make a difference, to alleviate suffering, to be needed. As David Bowie sang so long ago, “And these children that you spit on /As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations / They're quite aware of what they're going through.”

And they are quite aware of what their world is going through: endless war; arbitrary power exercised against the weak; Wall Street thieves with no conscience lauded as engines of progress; the reduction of all noble dreams into mere consumer preferences; the blitzkrieg against the environment – as if it were an enemy that needed to be vanquished - for a quick buck; and, most importantly, the shrinking ability to make a difference. The world is bleeding, and they are being told to put the bandages and sutures away and help with the stabbing. 

They are rejecting that pervasive model of the human being - now about 60 years old - that sees people only as isolated, calculating, paranoid agents determined to maximize self-interest. It's a model that comes out of the highly artificial Game Theory and Rational Agent Theory of the Cold War, but still tenaciously persistent in models of human experience.

They have come here because they are being treated as objects whose only function is to become a part of the producing-consuming machinery. Their hopes as well as their pain and suffering are thoroughly disregarded by the system, and by those in power. They have come here with their stories of loss and struggle. When I hear their stories, and when I tell mine, I know that we are people to one another. I know that we are creating solidarity of care and not one simply of policy and ideas.

The systems of policy, of economic formula, of law and order – are all ways of measuring what we are and then telling us what to do, without ever knowing or caring who we are. When we cohere around a set of demands, we play that game. When we become merely a set of ideas or votes or a quantum of economic impact, they simply measure and adjust. They “fix” our problem, and then quickly devise a way to break our humanity in some new way. We can resist becoming an object of their power and systems when we resist reducing our humanity, our stories, our struggles, and our pain, to object, ideas, demands, and policies, in this way. Their system and their ways of thinking are simply not equipped to recognize people as people. It is precisely in being a who to them instead of a what that we retain the possibility of ultimately breaking their machinery.

Like most of you here, I cannot get behind every specific political action against corruption, or corporate power, or the degradation of our environment, or the loss of our constitutional rights. And this is simply because I feel overwhelmed with the enormity of the crimes against my – our – humanity. A jobs creation bill won’t fix what’s wrong. A law protecting workers rights won’t fix what’s wrong. Reversals of judicial interpretations about corporate so-called personhood won’t fix what’s wrong. Stronger enforcement of environmental regulations won’t fix what’s wrong. Eliminating the Federal Reserve won’t fix it. Even jailing the Wall Street criminals – satisfying as that would be – won’t fix it. I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t vote or push for this or that economic policy or political change. There is often some good, perhaps, that can come from specific political and social action. But these particular actions – these demands – can be only one small part of what we do. And we must resist reducing ourselves to only this or that policy position or vote. There is so much wrong, and so much that has been going wrong for so many years that there is no policy fix or set of fixes for a system that has been fundamentally designed to benefit the very few at the expense of the many. There is no fixing a system that sees only economic data points, or merely counts votes “for” and “against,” or measures each of us in terms of our dollars earned and spent, or surveils our activity in terms of threat to the system. There is no fixing a system that does not see and hear human beings. 

          But here in this sacred space, sanctified by our being with, we can and we will see and hear and touch one another as human beings. Speaking for myself, I cannot be reduced to a “for” or “against” this or that policy and still Be. Right now, I am simply trying to occupy. Occupy Where and Who I Am. Be where I am. And I can Be for: for community, for connection, for a thriving planet, for humanity, for a shared future, for hope, for being heard and cared about, for my own healing, and being moved to heal another. I can Be for your story, Be for my story, and Be for the story we are telling together. My hearing and my testimony is my offering to you and myself, and my occupying of this space together with you. It isn’t easy, but I am listening. I hear you. Tell me your story.