Dillon Waugh
Hayes
English 100 – 9:10
4/9/13
Word Count: 1,318
Occupy Inquiry: The
Legacy of Occupy
The Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across
America and beyond, inspiring similar socioeconomic protests in Russia and
Australia among others, had passed its first anniversary as of September 2012
with question on what that year of fame and infamy was all for. While it began
with clarion cries to the government to close the wealth gap and curse the rich
for clinging to their money, there is general agreement that the legacy of the
Occupy movement is not in any legislature that it called for. This leaves its
remaining sympathizers to circle at the edges of its remnants as it continues
to barely coast as what it was originally, burning out like an asteroid; they
either look on ahead and all around at the burning fringes of its wake to
analyze why its demands are not and have not been meant, or back along that
wake for traces of what its legacy is, and how long they will last.
The first of the groups are generally in agreement: the Occupy
movement’s insistent questions and requests were never directly answered
because they were often incomprehensible; as the movement gained size, it lost
its focus. Meghan Barr in the Northwest
Herald interviews an early Occupy official who regretted that many of the
movement’s observers joined for excuse to “talk about every social ill we
have”, obscuring the movement’s original core intention, and Joe Nocera of the New York Times suggests, quite
similarly, that the protests became masses of diluted voices, agreeing not with
intensity on one issue but broadly, vaguely in a spirit of general liberality.
Katie Daubs agrees in an article in the Toronto Star that the movement would have benefitted from
ambassadors and official core messages and statements to “sell” – one point of
focus for its followers and watchers to fix their eyes on. Further on, Human Events’s John Hayward claims that the movement had “nothing new to
offer” – collecting and making all the usual laments on the government and
American society’s failings, not identifying a problem and demanding a
solution, and grew meaningless – appeared as pointless “whining”, as often
criticized.
Conceding this as the fairest of criticism for the movement as
well is Leif Dautch of U.S.A. Today.
However, by his interpretation, the Occupiers are not the ones missing the
point of the movement: according to Dautch, “The unifying principle of the movement is
not based on political or economic theory, but instead on a quintessentially
moral theme” – the best spirit for a protest to take, as after all, “economics
is premised on the assumption that people will act solely in their best
interest. Morality is one of the few remaining realms in which individuals are
occasionally expected to act for another's benefit.”
The point of the
Occupy movement, then, is not in voices reaching through the walls of governing
offices – it is in provocation of thought in the people, the potential for
inspiration. And here, it has certainly left some impression. Returning closer
to home from Occupy-inspired anti-inequality movements in Canada, Russia,
Australia, and Spain, among others, the protests have sparked the founding of
several charities and citizen-run programs and foundations. Journalist Ruth
MacLean describes the Rolling Jubilee, an online fundraiser for cancellation of
medical debt.
The question
remains, however, of whether those marks
made are ones that are meant to last. As the title of Daubs’s
article asks it, “The Occupy Movement Gets People Asking Questions. But Are
They The Right Ones?” If they are, will those answers stick? The Rolling
Jubilee is holding firm – “Got $10 to spare? We’ll liberate someone from $200
of debt,” their website swears; though since their launch in November of 2012
they’ve only raised under $600,000 (less than half of the funds raised in under
a week for an upcoming indie video game based on popular web comic Homestuck) – but they boast that that
money has gone to bail out over $11,000,000 of debt, and its sibling program in
affiliation, intent, and origin in the spirit of Occupy called Strike Debt
makes active many-times-daily use of the usual handfuls of social media feeds.
But if what Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee have managed are victories, are
those victories shared with Occupy as a whole – were those approximately
$600,000 worth of donors sympathizers of the plight of the 99% dredged in
household debt for transactions America’s spoiled could have paid with a flap
of the wrist, or simply willing to lend a small hand to people having trouble
paying a few necessary expenses?
It’s also uncertain whether or not the controversies that the
movement has brought into vogue are indeed proof of its effectiveness. As long
as wealth is gathered and hoarded in the lofts at the topmost levels of the
socioeconomic infrastructure, all people but those luckiest enough to live
there will be discontented, and were before the movement started to
arhythmically stomp its feet – and that the movement’s core message was a moral
one, wouldn’t it have nonetheless benefitted from communication by a conducted
unison of voices instead of obscurity in a once merely socialistic (another
message for America to receive – “socialism” is, in and of itself, hardly the
black-speech unthinkable heresy it’s treated as) turned socialistic, anarchic,
etc. and often self-contradictory babble? Meanwhile, America is in a period of
recession – economics and economic policy are always a topic of discussion, as
is tax policy and the trouble of the wealth gap. Income tax rates may indeed be
slightly more specific than will occur to the average citizen to ponder on, and
the statistics dredged up and theories posed in regards to the current rates
and possible effects of alternative ones are likely useful – but are their
detailed examination a thing that Occupy should be credited for?
Occupy’s heyday noise echoes, indeed, its own and that of
its responses. When I listen in on them, they come more and more to sound
lamentingly like the Placebo lyrics, with the surrounding imagery of two
comrades drinking late-night disappointment and all: “The call to arms was
never true!” Read across the worldwide Occupy timeline at a year’s worth of
protests – beginning with the gala start and rallying cries of “We are the
99%!” in New York with reports of demonstrations in Asia popping up even this
year. Most coverage, however, turns up on protests alone, reports on their
aftermath fewer and further between except to question where it ought to be
looked for. It has moved and moved as a call for everymen and women to come up
to the podium and raise their hands to make long-unsatisfied demands of the
socioeconomic system. Occupy Oakland’s demonstration is reported to have made a
community of its protestors, living a minimalistic but happily Rousseau-esque
period of sharing, providing, and all that people begin to forget to value
after second grade. But as the movements have grown to too great a size to hold
their cohesive shape, people have shouted and people have thought – but they
have forgotten how to act. People want help and to help others, yet they cling
to their hard-earned 99-percent-er’s money that charities would accept or that
could be waved like a flag to attract like-minded friends to open up an
informal community campsite or dinner hall. But that does not mean that the
fight is a lie. They know that the issue that inspired the Occupy movement is a
moral one to begin with, deep down, but that morality roots far too many points
of discontent, and when they step forward to offer themselves for the militia
and the plans of attack get lost with the messenger, they are too afraid, too directionless and indecisive
to fight, and give in when the perceived opponent doesn’t change direction in
the face of sheer spirit. Occupy has brought people together, surely – but it
takes not only being together but thinking together to bring about change.
Works Cited
Barr, Meghan. “1 year on, Occupy is in disarray; spirit
lives on.” Sept. 17, 2012. Northwest Herald. Web.
Nocera, Joe. The New York Times through “Occupy Wall Street
fails to create change.” Sept. 19, 2012. U.S.A. Today. Web.
Daubs, Katie. “Occupy Movement gets people asking questions
– but are they the right ones?” Toronto Star. Web.
Hayward, John. Human Events through “Occupy Wall Street
fails to create change.” Sept. 19, 2012. U.S.A. Today. Web.
Dautch, Leif. “Occupy about morality, not economics.” Nov.
13, 2011. U.S.A. Today. Web.
The Rolling Jubilee. http://rollingjubilee.org/
