who blogs at Dirigo Blue and Kennebec Blues.
No one asked for my or anyone else’s advice but the OCCUPY movement that captured the persistent feeling of economic slippage by the middle class and economic system disenchantment of young people should not become a background story to 2011 politics. The tea party had one foot in the unfairness camp with their early anger at big bank bailouts but were expediently co-opted into far right free market puppethood. OCCUPY still stands with both feet symbolically on Wall Street unfairness but if it fades the danger grows in this country for a far more frightening reaction to the growing inequality that continues to increase at an ever more rapid pace.
Conservatives love to rail about class warfare being waged by liberals and progressives but it is something they have not experienced in any shape or form with any classical manner of class driven civil strife. The right even convinced a segment of a mostly older population, beyond their peak earning years, to become a line of defense for wealth with an anti-tax mantra and insidious plays on xenophobia using immigration, ACORN operatives, and the President being “foreign” with the tea party. However, if OCCUPY fades and more body blows to the middle class push more of its members into poverty and effectively hold in place many others in terms of just hanging on to what seems to be an ever downward spiral of personal economic angst and failed aspirations, the successor reaction in not many months or few years will be out and out class warfare.
Wealthy interests, both corporate and individual, are overplaying their hand every day believing that they are just another international financial transaction or gated community away from facing real adversarial class comeuppance. OCCUPY, their severe critic, may just be their best savior if can become a player in transitional and transformative managed change versus rapid radical and potentially destructive real class warfare which may become justifiable in the minds of broader numbers of Americans.
I urge OCCUPY to take a greater role in our body politic to achieve their fairness aims. But this is not the advice of plugging into a particular political party as occurred with the tea party to yield a minority within a majority uncompromising rightward swing with disjointed talking right wing radio talking points. Rather, I want the primal scream of OCCUPY which gained our attention to co-opt a central part of the political landscape in the 2012 elections over OCCUPY being a force used by any particular party.
The breaking up of OCCUPY encampments and the onset of winter along with the noisy volume of the Presidential election heating up may seem to be pushing the movement below the surface. Its unconventional consensus leadership and social media organizing are strengths that can push it forward even if perceived by some to be a weakness. My hope is that intense discussion, strategizing, and planning is occurring because the inequity OCCUPY rightfully indicted still remains and the activists it created see a nonstop push by wealth to dominate or exempt themselves from society as more reasons supporting and compelling their activism as essential to the well being of their future.
My advice is meant to be simple and only a seed. Do not be co-opted but co-opt us; occupy our political minds. OCCUPY is needs to articulate a vision and occupy a civil protest posture in the public physical space. To that end, I recommend with deference toward OCCUPY inventiveness, the teach-in model of the 1960s deployed on a grand and continual scale during the Presidential election. We’ve heard the inequity message from the movement but now we need to hear what to do about it. Large and small but numerous OCCUPY teach-ins cropping up this spring could capture the imagination of more Americans and energize the election to turn on inequity. And a desire to learn could attract many to teach-ins that stand also as visible protests against inequality.
I am not so naive to think that all OCCUPY activists, many who are clearly disappointed with President Obama, want to plug into politics that they see as a part of the problem and risk becoming a surrogate for incumbent policies they disagree with on many levels. However, I know that the civil rights movement pushed President Johnson to embrace his instincts on addressing racial inequity more forcefully. I know that even if the anti-war movement in the late sixties and early seventies did not result in electing an anti-war President, it effectively cut American Vietnam involvement short. I know that the anti-nuclear actions in the eighties and nineties have injected great caution into political considerations of atomic power and weaponry for a generation now. And I believe that in this century early and ongoing anti-war protests that grew ever larger ended a likely longer fifty year South Korean style American occupation of Iraq and saved many more lives.
Teach us OCCUPY. Take over our parks for a day and call us to gather to listen. Push the politicians. Force the issues of inequality into the 2012 campaign. Offer profound insight and creative solutions. Influence us. Change us.
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope...build(ing) a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
-Robert F. Kennedy