As the Occupy Wall Street folks in Zuccotti Park move into winter, circumstances are about to force a big decision on them--whether to tough it out through a long miserable New York winter, or find a reason to disband, which would almost certainly spark a similar disbanding at many if not all of the other Occupy sites. So as the movement reaches this pivotal moment, it's worth asking what they've accomplished, if anything.
I hear two principal complaints about the protestors (aside from the boringly obvious "hippies having sex in the park" blather): first, that the OWS people have too many demands, or incoherent demands; and second, that all they're doing is complaining, they're not doing anything to present possible solutions. So let's deal with the question of incoherence.
OWS is a deliberately-disorganized mass protest that began in New York and then spawned spinoffs across the globe. Their essential message has always been crystal clear: they were there to occupy Wall Street because the actions of Wall Street have done so much, globally, to wreck the world economy, drive millions of people out of work, leave unknown thousands of people homeless, etc. Wall Street greed, which is intended to represent absurd levels of income inequality, is a cancer on the body politic, and a lot of people aren't prepared to just sit idly by and be victimized anymore. (Insert the obvious quote from Network here.) Without even paying much attention to OWS when it first started, I understood all of this perfectly well.
But of course it's a mass movement, deliberately without spokespeople, and as any mass movement becomes truly massive, the bandwagon effect happens and people start to show up with a boatload of crazy-time. And because there are no spokespeople, any random nitwit in the crowd is seen as just as valid as anyone else. So while there have in fact been plenty of coherent statements made about OWS's goals, there have also been just as many interviews with chowderheads who have no business discussing a recipe for chowder, let alone a global movement about income inequality. And every time a moron is handed a microphone, political opponents gleefully point fingers and start shouting about the incoherence of the movement itself. (The same is true of the various Tea Party gatherings, of course. They have their fair share of nitwits and chowderheads as well, and certainly their opponents have done their fair share of finger-pointing and shouting.)
Let's be clear, then. Here is a moron.
Here is a non-moron. There's a difference.
Much more interesting, though, is the criticism that OWS doesn't offer any solutions. And I find it interesting because it ties in with Story Theory, something I happen to be rather fond of. What I'm talking about boils down to this: there's an idea in the arts that a story doesn't have to solve a problem, it's enough to point out that a problem exists. What an audience takes away from the story, once the problem has been presented to them, is their own business. And the reason why this is important is because an issue can be talked about generally, but it has to be solved specifically--and each audience member has to find their own solution, something that works in their lives and takes into account their individual circumstances. I'll use one of my favorite examples: Dead Man Walking. There's a movie that works very hard to present every side of the death-penalty issue, and in the end, the only "solution" is that the criminal is put to death. But what that means in the world at large is left open. "Think about this," the filmmakers are saying, "then make up your own mind."
The same argument can be made for Occupy Wall Street. I can't say whether it's deliberate or not, but they've ended up crafting an open, enigmatic storyline in which a problem is cleary presented but solutions are not offered. (Actually, some are--the reinstatement of Glass-Steagal has been advocated for from the beginning, and I think it's a very good idea.) And the more the general public argues about what OWS stands for, the more we wonder what solutions OWS would like us to make, the closer we come to devising our own solutions--ones that will probably turn out to be far more creative and coherent than anything that could come from a bunch of cold, numb-fingered people shivering in a New York park.
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