Occupy Wall St. kicked off a nationwide uprising. It was as if through the audacity of their actions and the clarity of their purpose, they crystallized a solution that had been waiting, supersaturated. Within a week, occupations were rising up all over the nation. By mid-October, we had everyone's attention. Income inequality and corporate politics were at the center of national political discourse. The 99% had entered the conversation, at long last, and in the months since, our language is everywhere. If for no other reason than that, we had won the first battle.
So we know - and no matter what the news media said, everyone knows - that our politics are corrupt and money holds votes and runs elections; that our leaders represent corporations instead of us; that the 1% have robbed us blind and our politicians were willing accomplices; that finance has poisoned our democracy, assuming we ever had one to begin with. When people ask me about Occupy, that's where I start.
Just by shifting the conversation away from austerity and towards inequality we've won a significant victory. And if we could change only those points above, we'd have made a real improvement in American politics. A constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood would do wonders for this country and the world. But it won't be enough. Many of us have started to ask how these evident truths came about, and how they're connected to a larger picture. Why are homes being foreclosed on even as we build bigger prisons every day? If we don't live in a democracy - and we don't, no matter how early or often you vote - how can we build one? What is solidarity, and why does it matter? And most crucially, how did all this happen, anyway?
I had a conversation tonight that threw some light on why these questions are so real. A friend of mine, a woman who's been homeless for a while and who's fierce and bright and kind, told me about her experiences speaking at Occupy, in General Assembly and elsewhere. She told me that she watches how people treat her, when they listen and when they don't. If people know she's homeless, they quit listening. When a man makes a point she's made, all of a sudden everyone perks up. Even at Occupy, when those listening assume that she has access to money or privilege, they listen. Otherwise, she's just another voice crying more noise. I say that we cannot have a real democracy as long as this holds true. I've watched the same thing happen to friends of color, while I get serious expressions and nods for saying the exact same things, out of my white boy mouth.
The deep meaning of Occupy to me is that in a real public space, open and free, we have to confront these articles of power that poison our relations. We can't avoid them, and we can't bring them with us if we want to build anything enduring. Democracy has to protect itself or it will fail. Our lives and our minds and our world have been colonized, as surely as this continent was colonized and privatized and all the millions living here were sickened and tortured and killed. The same structures, the same systems that brought such horror upon the Americas, that built a wealth and a politics upon genocide and slavery, are what have brought us to this precipice. Inequality is not incidental. Democracy - the potential of all to come together and choose to face a collective fate - cannot stand privatization, and if we are to make a democracy for ourselves to live in, we have to face all structures of dominance that keep the 1% in power over us, and some of us in power over the rest.
The task I see for Occupy - especially for those within it who make these connections - is to translate that dense and deep truth outward. We can be audacious, daring, and brave. We have to be deep and thoughtful and comprehensive as well. I haven't said a word about banks, but everything I've said has been about banks. Banks and bankers are at the heart of all of these structures. Finance capital keeps us in debt and unheard, and it uses hierarchies of power to prevent us from coming together and rising up in righteous fury at what's been done to us. Ending corporate dominance means ending the dominance of the 1%. It means fighting patriarchy. It means destroying racism. It means decolonizing ourselves and our world of the systems put in place to keep us separate and fighting for power over each other. The illegitimacy of our government and its owners on Wall St. is obvious. The depth of their power over us is not, and their methods are dark and unclarified.
Let's go there. Let's take this moment of public attention and power and translate that to an enduring understanding of how we can do better, and how deeply we are committed to freeing ourselves from all the ways we've been kept apart. Let's make our democracy a truth, and let's be free.
