BRATTLEBORO — The September/October centerfold of Adbusters magazine showed a female dancer atop the brass bull icon of lower Manhattan, the symbol of Wall Street. She is calm; her arms are outstretched.
She is not quite Joan of Arc, but she conveys the power and grace of a superior consciousness rising from the back of the charging bull unaware that his time is up. Behind her, in a cloud of tear gas, a mob is in the throes of battle.
The call rang out in bold text: “Occupy Wall Street September 17th. Bring Tent.”
Unlike the poster's hint of Seattle at the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999, what the New York City police got instead was a YouTubed, Twittered, Facebooked exposé of this generation's confrontation with “Gestapo-like tactics in the streets of New York,” to paraphrase Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff at the 1968 Democratic Presidential Convention in Chicago, shaming the police back into a mostly civil relationship with the gathering.
From the pepper spray seen 'round the world to the surprisingly respectful response by the gathering, this seed of what could have been just another anarchists' picnic germinated and sprouted into a flowering consciousness-raising that this country desperately needs.
I had to go, just as I had to be in Chicago in '68.
If we are to be the democracy we claim for ourselves, there are some things I consider inviolate.
One right is that of anyone to think freely, whether tea partiers and anarchists or Communists and Catholics; another is the right to peacefully assemble. There are other necessary rights, of course, but when I watched the corralling, the pepper spray attack, the beatings of people already subdued on the ground prior to arrest, and the detention of journalists - our eyes and ears in New York - I had to do something.
The next day I was on the road to Zuccotti Park.
* * *
The energy in the park was thrilling. It was festive, welcoming, engaging.
It was also comforting and reassuring because here was a gathering of articulate, community-building people who didn't feel they all had to have the same priorities, the same agenda, or the same list of grievances, but who shared the belief that the system is not only broken, it will take serious rethinking to get our country back on track.
The genius of the coalition that urged the occupation was to recognize that it isn't about a single grievance - not even a long agenda of grievances.
It is about the vulgar appropriation of the labor of the nation for the astronomically disproportionate benefit of a select few people: the 1 percent, as they say, at the expense of the 99 percent.
It is the vulgarity of controlling all of the resources and means of production and then vacuuming all the crumbs that fall from the table: the so-called “entitlements” of Social Security, unemployment insurance, children's health assistance, and other programs that are no more than the collective common decency of one neighbor extending a helping hand to another.
It is the relentless aggregation of wealth in so few hands that is particularly galling. How can a decent society allow 400 people to accumulate more wealth than the total accumulated wealth of 160 million of its other citizens?
* * *
This voluntary, spontaneous coalition of self-organizing, self-regulating, respectful, articulate people is a welcome antidote to the self-centered, privileged, and paranoiac Tea Partiers who have so perversely twisted history and logic to claim that people like the fictional characters John Galt and Gordon Gekko built this country on self interest, greed, and narcissism, and that they deserve to own it as their personal bounty - and to hell with everyone else.
Every now and then I, as well as the nation, seem to fall through a rabbit hole, and I think I must be missing something when tax breaks for the rich are seen as reasonable even though their taxes are already at their historically lowest point, while so many societal needs go unmet.
I wonder how the Democrats fell into this hole, too, and became complicit with the Republican agenda. Their so-called “compromise” for bipartisanship is capitulation by another name.
Like the child crying out “But he isn't wearing anything at all!” in “The Emperor's New Clothes,” these articulate, mostly young people, point out the abject failure of the free-market system that in a winner-take-all world impoverishes millions, destroys the middle class, and has substituted a blanket of insecurity for the pitiful safety net that was once seen as the very least a prosperous country could do for its people.
When did it become a source of shame to build community?
When did the idea of progress toward a healthy, satisfying life for all become treasonous?
When did the idea of a pension at the end of one's life become a socialist plot to undermine America?
When did public education become a tool for instilling competitiveness and individual success instead of citizenship and a national identity?
* * *
Being at the gathering in Zuccotti Park allowed me to stand in solidarity with those abused by the system.
It was a way for me to take part, even an infinitesimal one, in the long-overdue repudiation of the Reagan-birthed neoconservative economics that became today's perverted predator capitalism - the one that ate not only New York, but also Chicago, Tokyo, São Paulo, Bangkok, Johannesburg, London, Paris, and everything in between, the one with globe-girdling tendrils that has made globalization synonymous with a rapaciousness that would make Adam Smith spin in his grave.
Bringing some of the pain - of unemployment, of a deteriorating environment, of out-of-reach higher education costs, of credit crunches and property foreclosures, of rising poverty, of deteriorating health care, of inadequate pensions, of a collapsing infrastructure, of more - to the doorstep of those who profited by causing all of this mayhem is the duty of each one of us.
They must be held accountable. The people of this country have paid to protect their privilege and shore up their institutions.
In return, the bankers and financiers resumed their abuse and restored their arrogance with the nourishment of enormous bonuses as if entitled to a bailout while forgetting where it came from. They need to be reminded.
Laying out myriad reasons and demands would only comfort them. It would only reassure them that fundamentally the system they created was okay, if only we just changed the oil or fixed a flat tire.
That won't do. The system itself needs a transformation. As one sign said, you can't fix a system that believes in “infinite growth on a finite planet.”
* * *
Was it a coincidence, I wonder, that Sept. 17 was chosen to begin this demonstration? That was the day in 1787 that the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia and sent to the states for ratification.
Ours was the first modern country to depend on its citizens to legitimize it. The document as read in the 13 state houses began, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare...”
The thrill of being with these people - young and old, employed and unemployed, union workers and professionals, the tech savvy and the tech averse - was all the more remarkable because of the conversations, the patience in listening to one another, the diversity of causes and aspirations, and the fundamental sense of participating in a commonwealth of mutual teaching and learning that was exhilarating. All voices were welcomed.
There was a scene that typified my observations.
Someone from the financial district began a conversation with a resident of the gathering, and it was going all over the place as these things do, but it was respectful.
A crowd naturally gravitated to the size that could accommodate natural hearing since there was no voice amplification. And, after going around a few times between “liberty” on the one hand and “fairness” on the other, a truce was called and with a handshake, the knot of spectators dispersed.
I turned to listen to the band play and watch a woman gyrating to keep several hula hoops moving while holding a sign that read, “There is enough to go around.”
She looked much as I imagined Joan of Arc felt who said, “I am not afraid... I was born to do this.”