It's hard to ignore the note of triumphalism exhibited by the likes of Michael Bloomberg, TV commentators and others over the recent rousting of Occupy Wall Street's encampment at Zucotti Park, as well as at its sister camps in Oakland and elsewhere. The spoken terms are polite enough: These actions, we are told, are in the name of public safety and public order, and any compromise of first amendment rights is simply an unfortunate but temporary sacrifice for the sake of the higher good of public well-being. The subtext is something else: That'll show 'em.
Bloomberg, Jean Quan and rafts of pundits seem to feel that simply dismantling a few tents, making a few arrests, and coercing a near-total news blackout on the momentary suppression of the most substantive popular movement since the Civil Rights era will be enough to defang OWS and the widespread sentiments it represents. It seems unlikely that this is the case, no matter how badly Bloomberg et. al. might wish to believe otherwise.
You don't have to be an OWS sympathizer to recognize that Bloomberg, the media, and the vast majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle simply don't get it. The misapprehension began with the chorus of early complaints that OWS wasn't organized, that it had no coherent list of demands, that it had no primary focus, all of which have served as ready excuses to categorically dismiss the protesters as lazy opportunistic hippies, drug addicts, or something worse. The complainers failed to recognize that far from being a weakness, this nebulousness is the source of the movement's strength.
What we are witnessing is a significant shift in popular attitudes and beliefs. As with shifts in the thinking of individual humans, it begins with the visceral and emotional, rather than the logical – a sense of dissatisfaction and disquiet. Seismic social events of the 1960s and 1970s – the election of Kennedy, the antiwar movement, the “I have a dream” speech, the Kent State shootings – were the culmination, rather than the initiation, of such shifts: The forces that would propel the civil rights movement, liberalized social attitudes towards sex, equality for women etc. had been slowly gathering strength for the preceding four decades. Before the messages were articulated, before changes were codified into law, the people had begun to move. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.
The "quiet desperation," to use Thoreau's words, of millions of dissatisfied and disillusioned Americans has just begun to bubble to the surface. In the recent past, the individual's first line of defense against such desperation has been detachment: Endless hours at the bar, at the mall, on Facebook, in front of the TV, at work, or otherwise disengaged from both their own feelings and from others who tended to feel precisely the same. At some point the palliatives began to lose their effect: Individually, people began to lose their ability to hold the feelings at bay - or hold themselves back. Inebriation, distraction, the consumption of mountains of products just weren't cutting it. Something had to give. And OWS, by virtue of its adaptability and amorphousness, becomes the perfect amalgamator for that frustration, that energy.
Politically, this is probably the beginning of the long, slow, and possibly painful unraveling of Post-Reaganism. While OWS may appear dramatic, it is only the beginning of what stands to be a generations-long transformation. The “Occupy” campers, like the fading Tea Partiers before them, are symptoms, not causes, of forces that are already broadly at work at all social strata: Life as cog, life as consumer has left broad swaths of the populace insecure, unfulfilled, and more than a little bit resentful. Plainly put, people are beginning to move from being repressed and depressed to being outright pissed. And unless I miss my guess, that’s going to force plenty of changes through. A critical number of Americans are getting ready to demand something more, something different. They may not know what it is just yet, but their demand is unlikely to be satisfied by new reality TV shows or 5G smartphones. The degree to which the power structure meets that demand will determine how transformative, how weird, or how ugly things ultimately get.
The Occupy movement, whether physically manifest in public parks or not, continues unabated; its messaging will ultimately take care of itself. But OWS is only the small, visible portion of a seismic social shift. All the Bloombergs and Quans in the world cannot begin to hold it back.
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Cross-posted at my blog at DavidBLivingstone.com. Thanks for reading...