Occupy Your Heart
Compassion Is Our New Currency
Notes on 2011's Preoccupied Hearts and Minds
by Rebecca Solnit
Tom Dispatch
December 22, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175483/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_occupy_your_heart/#more
Usually at year's end, we're supposed to look back at events
just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year
to come. But just look around you! This moment is so
extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in
thousands of communities across the United States and
elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct
democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging
the media and politicians to do the same.
The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth
another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our
economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional
assumptions on which it's based. Take the pair shown in a
photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking
elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words
say, "Money has stolen our vote." The older man next to her
with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on
cardboard that states, "We are our brothers' keeper."
The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a
single moment in the remarkable period we're living through
and the astonishing movement that's drawn in. well, if not
99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from
teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video
to Alaska Yup'ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding
a sign that says "Yirqa Kuik" in big letters, with the
translation -- "occupy the river" -- in little ones below.
The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them.
Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our
fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of
Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain
said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel's life. He
was not, he claimed, his brother's keeper; we are not, he
insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated,
each of us for ourselves.
Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this
Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our
operating system should be love; we are all connected; we
must take care of each other. And this movement, he's
saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a
decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva,
the politics of affection.
If it's a movement about love, it's also about the money
they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and
about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war
with each other. After all, in the American heartland,
people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the
Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness,
renegotiation, and debt jubilees.
Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins. One morning late
last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare
center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after
dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the
other children were locked out because she was behind in her
mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in
a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating
with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home
of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers
for the children.
We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass's shabby
offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San
Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True
Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American
grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media
attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved
back in, and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage.
Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended
by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland
to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker, and
Occupier Astra Taylor puts it,
Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes
connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can
also lead to swift and tangible victories, something
movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained.
The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might
expect because so many cases are rife with legal
irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five
homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of
slowing down in the next few years, the number of people
touched by the mortgage crisis -- whether because they have
lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater
-- truly boggles the mind."
If what's been happening locally and globally has some of
the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never
been one quite so pervasive -- from the scientists holding
an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places
as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, Sao Paulo,
Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Reykjavik. And
don't forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning
at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown
demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County,
a small rural area in California's Sierra Nevada. Its
largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants,
which hasn't stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday
evening Occupy meetings.
A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was
carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate
early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said,
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be
seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart."
Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and
economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has
some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a
political, movement. Like those other upheavals it's
aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they're
actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia,
Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask
basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On
what principles?
Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and
unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010,
Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi
Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated
himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1%
economy run by Tunisia's autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and
his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality
that went with it, two things that have remained front and
center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since
testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is,
where the primary system of value is not money.
"Compassion is our new currency," was the message scrawled
on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in
lower Manhattan -- held by a pensive-looking young man in
Jeremy Ayers's great photo portrait. But what can you buy
with compassion?
Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and
even pizza, which can arrive at that movement's campground
as a gift of solidarity. A few days into Occupy Wall
Street's surprise success, a call for pizza went out and
$2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier
this year the occupiers of Wisconsin's state house had been
copiously supplied with pizza -- including pies paid for and
dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.
The Return of the Disappeared
During the 1970s and 1980s dictatorship and death-squad era
in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Central America, the term
"the disappeared" came to cover those who were kidnapped,
held in secret, tortured, and then often executed in secret.
So many decades later, their fates are often still being
deciphered.
In the United States, the disappeared also exist, not thanks
to a brutal army or paramilitaries, but to a brutal economy.
When you lose your job, you vanish from the workplace and
sooner or later arrive at emptiness in your day, your
identity, your wallet, your ability to participate in a
commercial society. When you lose your home, you disappear
from familiar spaces: the block, the neighborhood, the rolls
of homeowners. Often, you vanish in shame, leaving behind
friends and acquaintances.
At the actions to support some of the 1,500 mostly African-
American homeowners being foreclosed upon in southeastern
San Francisco, several of them described how they had to
overcome a powerful sense of shame simply to speak up, no
less defend themselves or join this movement. In the U.S.,
failure is always supposed to be individual, not systemic,
and so it tends to produce a sense of personal devastation
that leaves its victims feeling alone and lying low, even
though they are among legions of others.
The people who destroyed our economy through their
bottomless greed are, on the other hand, shameless -- as
shameless as the CEOs whose compensation shot up 36% in
2010, during this deep and grinding recession. Compassion is
definitely not their currency.
The word "occupy" itself speaks powerfully to the American
disappeared and the very idea of disappearance. It speaks
to those who have lost their occupation or the home they
occupied. In its many meanings, it's a big tent. It means to
fill a space, take possession of it, employ oneself, busy
oneself, fill time. (In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the verb had a meaning so sexual it fell out of
common use.) It describes the state of being present that
the Occupy movement's General Assemblies and tent camps have
lived out, a space in which -- as Mohamed Bouazizi might
have dreamed it -- the disappeared can reappear with
dignity.
Occupy has also created a space in which people of all kinds
can coexist, from the homeless to the tenured, from the
inner city to the agrarian. Coexisting in public with
likeminded strangers and acquaintances is one of the great
foundations and experiences of democracy, which is why
dictatorships ban gatherings and groups -- and why our First
Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to
assemble is being tested more strongly today than in any
recent moment in American history. Nearly every Occupy has
at its center regular meetings of a General Assembly. These
are experiments in direct democracy that have been messy,
exasperating and miraculous: arenas in which everyone is
invited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a member, to
shape the future. Occupy is first of all a conversation
among ourselves.
To occupy also means to show up, to be present -- a
radically unplugged experience for a digital generation.
Today, the term is being applied to any place where one
plans to be present, geographically or metaphorically:
Occupy Wall Street, occupy the food system, occupy your
heart. The ad hoc invention of the people's mic by the
occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to
listen, repeat, and amplify what's being said, has only
strengthened this sense of presence. You can't text or half-
listen if your task is to repeat everything, so that
everyone hears and understands. You become the keeper of
your brother's or sister's voice as you repeat their words.
It's a triumph of the here and now -- and it's everywhere:
the Regents of the University of California are mic-checked,
politicians are mic-checked, the Durban Climate Conference
in South Africa had occupiers and mic-check moments.
Activism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing
things, and this year it got them.
A Mouthful of Truth
Before the Occupy movement arrived on the scene, political
dialogue and media chatter in this country seemed to be
arriving from a warped parallel universe. Tiny government
expenditures were denounced, while the vortex sucking our
economy dry was rarely addressed; hard-working immigrants
were portrayed as deadbeats; people who did nothing were
anointed as "job creators"; the trashed economy and massive
suffering were overlooked, while politicians jousted over
(and pundits pontificated about) the deficit; class war was
only called class war when someone other than the ruling
class waged it. It's as though we were trying to navigate
Las Vegas with a tattered map of medieval Byzantium -- via,
that is, a broken language in which everything and everyone
got lost.
Then Occupy arrived and, as if swept by some strange
pandemic, a contagious virus of truth-telling, everyone was
suddenly obliged to call things by their real names and talk
about actual problems. The blather about the deficit was
replaced by acknowledgments of grotesque economic
inequality. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true
name, it became intolerable, as had racism when the Civil
Rights Movement named it and made it evident to those who
weren't suffering from it directly. The vast scale of
suffering around student debt and tuition hikes,
foreclosures, unemployment, wage stagnation, medical costs,
and the other afflictions of the normal American suddenly
moved to the top of the news, and once exposed to the light,
these, too, became intolerable.
If the solutions to the nightmares being named are neither
near nor easy, naming things, describing reality with some
accuracy, is at least a crucial first step. Informing
ourselves as citizens is another. Aspects of our not-quite-
democracy that were once almost invisible are now on the
table for discussion -- and for opposition, notably
corporate personhood, the legal status that gives
corporations the rights, but not the obligations and
vulnerabilities, of citizens. (One oft-repeated Occupier
sign says, "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas
puts one to death.")
The Los Angeles City Council passed a measure calling for an
end to corporate personhood, the first big city to join the
Move to Amend campaign against corporate personhood and
against the 2009 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that
gave corporations unlimited ability to insert their cash in
our political campaigns. Occupy actions across the country
are planned for January 20th, the second anniversary of
Citizens United. Vermont's independent Senator Bernie
Sanders, who's been speaking the truth alone for a long
time, introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal
Citizens United and limit corporate power in the Senate,
while Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a similar
measure in the House.
Only a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what corporate
personhood was. Now, signs denouncing it are common.
Similarly, at Occupy events, people make it clear that they
know about the New Deal-era financial reform measure known
as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was partially repealed in
1999, removing the wall between commercial and investment
banks; that they know about the proposed financial transfer
tax, nicknamed the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise billions
with a tiny levy on every financial transaction; that they
understand many of the means by which the 1% were enriched
and the rest of us robbed.
This represents a striking learning curve. A new language of
truth, debate about what actually matters, an informed
citizenry: that's no small thing. But we need more.
We Are the 99.999%
I was myself so caught up in the Occupy movement that I
stopped paying my usual attention to the war over the
climate -- until I was brought up short by the catastrophic
failure of the climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa.
There, earlier this month, the most powerful and carbon-
polluting countries managed to avoid taking any timely and
substantial measures to keep the climate from heating up and
the Earth from slipping into unstoppable chaotic change.
It's our nature to be more compelled by immediate human
suffering than by remote systemic problems. Only this
problem isn't anywhere near as remote as many Americans
imagine. It's already creating human suffering on a large
scale and will create far more. Many of the food crises of
the past decade are tied to climate change, and in Africa
thousands are dying of climate-related chaos. The floods,
fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are
climate change coming to call earlier than expected in the
U.S.
In the most immediate sense, Occupy may have weakened the
climate movement by focusing many of us on the urgent
suffering of our brothers, our neighbors, our democracy. In
the end, however, it could strengthen that movement with its
new tactics, alliances, spirit, and language of truth. After
all, why have we been unable to make the major changes
required to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The
answer is a word suddenly in wide circulation: greed.
Responding adequately to this crisis would benefit every
living thing. When it comes to climate change, after all, we
are the 99.999%.
But the international .001% who profit immeasurably from the
carbon economy -- the oil and coal tycoons, industrialists,
and politicians whose strings they pull -- are against this
change. For decades, they've managed to propagandize many
Americans, in and out of government, into climate denial,
spreading lies about the science and economics of climate
change, and undermining any possible legislation and
international negotiations to ameliorate it. And if you
think the eviction of elderly homeowners is brutal, think of
it as a tiny foreshadowing of the displacement and
disappearance of people, communities, nations, species,
habitats. Climate change threatens to foreclose on all of
us.
The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org
and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already.
Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local
activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed
to kill the single scariest and biggest North American
threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline that would go
from Canada to Texas. It's been a remarkable show of
organizing power and popular will. Occupy the Climate may
need to come next.
Maybe Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of spin-offs have
built the foundation for it. But perhaps the greatest gift
that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a
sharpening of our perceptions -- and our conflicts. So much
more is out in the open now, including the greed, the
brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the
Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all
the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and
around these insurgencies and their activists. None of these
movements is perfect, and individuals within them are not
always the greatest keepers of their brothers and sisters.
But one thing couldn't be clearer: compassion is our new
currency.
Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire,
realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across
differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to
embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those
messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard
signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to
me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at
Occupy, and they call it love.
In the spirit of calling things by their true names, let me
summon up the description that Ella Baker and Martin Luther
King used for the great communities of activists who stood
up for civil rights half a century ago: the beloved
community. Many who were active then never forgot the deep
bonds and deep meaning they found in that struggle. We --
and the word "we" encompasses more of us than ever before --
have found those things, too, and this year we have come
close to something unprecedented, a beloved community that
circles the globe.
[Rebecca Solnit, a TomDispatch regular, continues occupying
the public library, the sidewalks, her deepest hopes, and
the armchair in which she writes, supports 350.org, and
joins Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland in their
general assemblies and actions.]
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