My last post was called " Why I came to Occupy Wall Street and Why I Left," and I caught a lot of grief from my readers for not giving them what the title promised: I explained why I came to OWS -- that's the easy part -- but I didn't really say why I left. It's going to take a whole series of posts to properly explain why I stopped working on the movement, but I think it'll help ease the suspense if I write a few words about what it even means to "leave" Occupy Wall Street. That verb, I'll be the first to admit, was an inappropriate one.
My first month at OWS was characterized by a wild optimism, a hope unleashed. I lived in a state of constant excitement, running on so much adrenaline I would forget to eat and dropped ten pounds in two weeks. I was surrounded by dozens of others in the same state of mind. I remember one day in late October, crossing Broadway at Exchange Place, wolfing down some street food and barely tasting it, and some girl I'd never met crossing in the other direction said to me, "That's how you know an Occupy Wall Street protestor: He's trying to eat lunch while running through the street." And it was true: We were all running around like maniacs, working our hearts out, because finally we'd found something worth working our hearts out for.
Like many in my generation, it seems, I had waited my whole life for a social movement whose dimensions and ambitions were commensurate with the shortcomings I saw in the world around me. By now, I am convinced that OWS is not that movement. Maybe it will grow into that movement, or maybe that movement will grow out of it. Then again, maybe that movement will never come. But this rise and fall of hope has left me and so many others not less hopeful, but more. It has been suggested that the excitement generated by Obama's election and dashed by his presidency was re-channeled into the Occupy movement; and so many of us who have stepped back from the movement in recent weeks have departed only to search for a better movement -- or else to build one. The shroud of despair, it seems, once torn, is not quickly mended.
I could write a lot about hope -- almost as much as I could about listening. The word "hope" has gone limp from overuse, but maybe it got overused in the first place because hope itself is in such short supply. After all, that's how public discourse operates in this culture. Those concepts that we most desperately need to discuss are left to the ravings of a frustrated and usually whiny counter-culture. Sometimes they get picked up by politicians, but either way, they are boxed into a glib, superficial rhetoric that more resembles a branding campaign than any kind of cultural criticism. In due course, they are condemned as corny, hippy-dippy, new-age, or simply played out, and can then be safely barred from any serious political discussion. No one is orchestrating this process; no one planned it; like so many seemingly malevolent mechanisms in our society, it is simply happening: a side-effect, an accident, a naturally-occurring nightmare.
So let's talk about hope. Before Occupy, the baby boomers used to call us (their children) apathetic. One thing that Occupy has demonstrated is that the problem wasn't apathy, it was despair. When we said, "Why bother," it wasn't because we didn't care; it was because we didn't think we had a shot. But maybe that's letting us off too easy. After all, hope isn't so much a probabilistic analysis as it is a relationship to action. When we have hope, we don't think our odds are any better than when we don't; it's more that we're in the mood to take a gamble. So, maybe hopeless is just another word for lazy, but I think it's more correct to put it the other way around: Lazy is another word for hopeless. That is, if we seemed lazy when it came to marching in the streets, it was because history and society had conspired to convince us that that sort of gamble wasn't worth taking.
But what is it exactly that we risk, when we take arms against our sea of troubles? What is the precious quantity that we stand to lose, that keeps so many people with radical concerns from doing something radical? Sure, working for OWS takes time and energy, but time and energy are renewable resources; no, it's not fear of wasted effort that holds us back. Maybe it's our cynicism that we risk: our last and best line of defense, our one source of dignity in an undignified world. Maybe it's our capacity for hope that we seem to expose, our capacity for devotion, for earnestness, bound to the idiocy and madness of a chaotic, impossible project. No wonder, then, that we hesitate. Who can blame us?
But once you've done it, why go back? I've already vested my hope and my dignity in a movement that one commenter on my last post chose to satirize as follows: "I attended an OWS protest but then I left because there weren't enough 'Rape Tents.'" I've already exposed myself as an idealist whose greatest utopian project was a crime-ridden shanty-town in lower Manhattan. Existentially speaking, my chips are down. Why quit now?
The thing is, you can't really leave Occupy, for the simple reason that Occupy has no borders. It's not an organization. It has no membership. It has no mandatory events. The whole discussion of what is and what isn't Occupy has always been spurious. Occupy is everything that calls itself "Occupy" and everything that someone else calls "Occupy," which is, more or less, everything. And, anyway, I still attend the occasional meeting, drop by Union Square to say "hi" to friends.
But I did stop working actively on the movement, and I stopped because two things changed. First, as deeply and wholeheartedly as I continue to respect those who are still devoting themselves to OWS, I came to think that the movement was not moving in a direction that I wanted to go; that the internal problems I'd been struggling with since I arrived (more on this soon) were getting worse, not better and that those problems were not isolated or incidental but were in fact coded into the cultural and ideological foundations of the movement. Second, I suddenly lost all appetite and energy for the work I was doing on the movement; with very little warning, I went from indefatigable to torpid.
It is these two transitions that I hope to explore through these posts. I am not the only one to have stepped back from the movement, in the past couple months. Many devoted activists have gone their separate ways lately, and if we hope someday to build a stronger movement, we'd better think hard about why this has happened. But let the impatient beware: I can't explain all this in a hurry.
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I came to think that the movement was not moving in a direction that I wanted to go; that the internal problems I'd been struggling with since I arrived (more on this soon) were getting worse, not better and that those problems were not isolated or incidental but were in fact coded into the cultural and ideological foundations of the movement.
This sounds like a good start; but, if you got this gig partly because of Occupy, or just because YOU brought it up... you gotta speak out. The instinct to cover up for your distaste of what friends are doing is as core to the continuation of all of society's problems as anything else, and yet again, the movement reproduces the problems it it is there to fix.
I thought fighting for an economic leg up was fighting for the ability to sell out.
It's 2012 when people in OWS decide to fight fire with fire and put in suits and lobby Washington, because why isn't it doing that?! I'll join.
Scared of corruption? Set time limits for anyone holding such a position. Want to give everyone a voice? Great the limits will allow everyone to have their turn. One of the largest problems with our government today is that the people do not have access because of the lobbyist. Well be the lobbyist for the people and all the people can feel that their voice can be heard in America again. That's the movement I want to be a part of, a movement for 2012 and beyond, not something regressive. Tell me when that starts and I'm there!
i can't recall who said " the truth becomes part of your past, a lie becomes part of your future" but it seems applicable here.
Go figure. The Professional Left spends most of its time being smacked around by Democrats and trying to rationalize why Obama cannot get his act together. Truly sad.
I've actually skimmed all 159 comments on this post & yours is easily the most thoughtful. I'm actually kind of shocked to receive something so nuanced in a forum like this. Thanks for leaving it.
The issue you're raising is one I think about a lot when writing posts. I agree that concrete experience is the most reliably valuable and readable substance I have to offer. At the same time, if I didn't have some analysis to offer on top of that experience, I wouldn't bother writing these posts-- and they probably wouldn't be very interesting. In the end, if any of this is worth reading, it's because it reveals things about OWS and my generation that are relevant beyond my own personal experience.
So, there's something of a balance to be struck. The problem with this post, arguably, is that a lot of the analysis comes *before* any relevant substance. The challenge I face in writing these posts is to arrange things so that the substance always precedes the analysis; that way, I'm never writing into an abstract void, but reflecting on experience. The trouble is, I have so many thoughts & memories, and they're all so interconnected, that I sometimes end up reversing the order.
Anyway, point taken about the philosophizing. I'm not promising to cut it out-- I actually think it's important-- but I will try to ground it more firmly in particulars and avoid opening posts with it.
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False dichotomy to the nth degree.
Maybe they just don't like what he has done to our civil liberties or how he has continued to align himself with the banking industry (let's be real on what a weak cup of tea the regulations that have passed under him have been).
WHA whaaaaa.... poor boy, I do think he needs a vacation. I think Club Med is having a special this month. ... Expect change! Change-up keeps the batter on his toes. Perseverance furthers.
Max Bean writes very well. He has a competent way of expressing his views and opinions, and getting his message across; that's not easy. In fact, I now have a much better understanding of what it's like to be a self centered narcissistic failure at something.
I would wait with baited breath for the upcoming multi-blog analysis of exactly why it takes a thousand words to say, "This isn't what I thought it would be and I can't figure out why, but I'm
too disinterested to try and change it, so I quit.", ...BUT, I have a life that isn't turning out as what
I thought it would be, so I'm busy trying to figure out what I can do to change it because there is
no up side to quitting.
P.S.
My dream for Occupy Wall Street is that they get organized, pool resources, obtain funding, and become a powerful K Street lobbyist group for the people.
I figure if one can dream, why not go way out there.
If you want to make waves you have got to take on the Democratic Party - that frightens the hell out of most Progressive/Liberals. They are captured by a corporate controlled political Party that cannot solve problems because it is just designed to secure money - and run for office. It abandoned its base a long time ago.
Perhaps some movers and shakers within OWS, if ther are any , might take a look at talking to some in the union movement , who I am sure, have some of the same motives. The union movement itself is becoming less of a factor, due to the pressure on governments from corporations with there legions of lobbyists , than they were but they do have an existing structure that might advance mutual interests for the benefit of all.
WE WILL GIVE IT TO THEM