Occupy Ashland (Laurence Lewis)
At the end of this month, many Americans will gather for ritual celebrations of gratitude for blessings real, imagined and mythical, but this year there is reason to celebrate something spontaneous and unexpected, something still emerging and unpredictable, something that has awakened long dormant ideals and dreams that transcend both history and politics and that speaks directly to the fundamental core of the human spirit. This year there is reason to celebrate a reawakening of hope—a hope not grounded in one person or one political or social faction, but a hope in the possibility of the triumph of the best that humanity can be. And this is a pure secular or non-denominational prayer or expression of gratitude to all who have participated or in any positive way contributed to the Occupy effort.
From one small band of activists on one small street, we now see a movement gone global, both inspired by and now inspiring other similar movements all around the globe. The world's most powerful aristocrats, politicians and presumptive royals of industry would have us believe that certain artificially concocted and often nefarious economic structures are Too Big To Fail, but the reality is that both the world and humanity will survive just fine without any single corporation or any conglomeration of corporations and industries. But the human race cannot survive without its basic sense of humanity. Only that is truly Too Big To Fail. And with politics and industry too often serving no positive purpose or common good, it is not those who have accumulated various forms of power that are coalescing to save us; it is people. Seemingly nameless, seemingly faceless, rising in the streets, armed with nothing but an accumulated outrage at the failures of our politics and industry and a profound sense of shared responsibility and determination in proving that things can be made better. That people can be better. That societies can function better. That the pretty words bedizening the entablatures and cathedral foyers of superficially glittering institutions prove incompatible with how those institutions function.
The Occupy movement has succeeded not only in changing the national economic dialogue from the callous abstractions of Austerity Summer to the reality that tens of millions of innocent people are being ground down by the gears of a political and economic system that seems immune to the human capacities for sympathy and empathy and community; the Occupy movement has succeeded in awakening those who retain the human and social capacities that the political and economic system apparently are incapable even of recognizing.
But the Occupy movement also has demonstrated that even the wounded, the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the forgotten are still capable of those human and social capacities. Without overt or explicit leadership or hierarchy, living in crudely constructed camps in parks and urban plazas, with little external and no institutional assistance, the Occupy movement has spontaneously self-organized into diverse and highly individualized communities. The Occupy movement has demonstrated the very meaning of community. While the powers that be would have us believe the Hobbesian conception of human beings as by nature cruel and selfish—thereby apparently hoping to justify the repetitive demonstrations of their own cruelty and selfishness—the Occupy movement has revealed something else. The human spirit can be crushed but it will not be broken. The atrophied sense of basic human decency that drives so much of our our political and economic system and so many of those that have clawed their ways to the penthouses of its hierarchies does not define human nature. It defines a type of human nature. But however much that type of human nature succeeds in hoarding the nation's and the world's material wealth, it remains, in every meaningful sense, destitute. The Occupy movement is there to remind us. To reveal us. To revivify us.
From my own personal experiences with those living in the Occupy communities, it seems obvious that different people have arrived for different reasons. Some in the media want to concoct a false conflict between the explicitly politically motivated and those who already were homeless and hungry and alone, as if there is a meaningful human difference. Because just by showing up, just by participating in and abiding by the emerging ethos of non-violent and mutually supportive community, those not previously politically motivated also are providing living, breathing proof of the larger premise. Things in this country do not have to be the way they are. This is not who people are. This is not genetic or glandular or otherwise hardwired into human nature. Even people with the least reason to be so can be better than some would have us all believe. If you don't believe it, go visit your local Occupy camp. I have witnessed first aid tents, organized sanitation, and patience and mutual respect even as people distribute and share limited supplies of food. I have heard or read of people training each other in non-violence, and of cleaning up the messes made by the relatively tiny number who have succumbed to their baser natures. And all of this in the face of threats and abuse and other forms of disregard and maltreatment by authorities and propagandists of authority who apparently feel threatened by the concepts of democracy and justice and community and humanity.
At the beginning of this month that will end with many Americans gathering for ritual celebrations of gratitude for blessings real, imagined and mythical, I want to express my own gratitude to all living in or participating in the Occupy movement. It doesn't matter what brings people to the movement. What matters is that they are there. Living it. Experiencing it. Making it happen. Making it matter. If you are camped in the parks and plazas, if you are lending support by bringing food or shelter, if you are writing about it, speaking about it, or otherwise bearing witness to it—I want to thank you. This is from me, personally, to each of you, personally. Because this is about issues so enormous, but it is also about the importance and dignity of every single person on the planet. It could not be more global, and it could not be more personal. In a world politically and economically dominated by those Too Big To Care, the ostensibly small have proved once again the greatness that resides, albeit sometimes dormant or latent, in every one us. If we only awaken to the possibility of realizing it. If we only awaken. I want to thank every individual who is creating a collective human movement that is Too Important To Fail. It's not only what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. Because the present does not have to be what it has been. The future is still ours to invent. With a world around us and within us in so many ways imploding, the Occupy movement has revealed and opened a path forward. It may be the only path forward.