Why We Occupy

Introduction

To a passer-by drilled in the formations of twenty-first-century America, an occupier is a stranger. All of her traits are alien; they might even be cause for alarm. She carries herself well. Her handshake is very firm. She maintains eye contact without wavering. She is confident and easy when engaged in conversation. Her voice—how it resounds! All of this resembles the people of twenty-first-century America not at all. We have only to peer into the nearest reflective surface to see it: “This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.”

When faced with occupiers en masse, our disturbance only grows. Their arrival is always preceded by a great noise. Before they appear, they are announced by shouts and cacophony. The sound reverberates from the office buildings and jars us at our desks. What kind of voices are these rattling the windows? Who are they?

Are they perhaps not people at all? But they must be people: They abhor wet socks. Just like people, they need peanut butter sandwiches at regular intervals in order to survive. If not people, then why do they have a beer at the end of a stressful day, or stamp their books for circulation? The little things add up quickly, and the first idea must be discarded. Even a casual observer can see that they are in fact people.

A disturbing second choice now asserts itself. A wild aberration in the laws of physics has occurred at a location somewhat to the northwest of the Stock Exchange. A greased slide of dark matter has manifested—though maybe it was a fold, or better call it a ripple; it could even have been a flexing of string. Perhaps a cæsura in the fabric of space-time. If we want something more specific, we should call the university and get an expert on the phone! But even without an expert, the layman is forced to see the sense before his nose. All signs point to it directly: Occupiers are people from the future.

It is obvious, irrefutable. People from the present are complacent, while occupiers face pepper-spray and cuffs and go willingly to jail. They march though every step is dogged by their faithful chaperones the police, though every time ten people and a sign step out onto pavement, the mayor calls for troops in phalanx. In the park, they shelled and ate their peanuts under the unblinking eye of a guard tower that saw and strained to hear not just their lawful assemblies, but every clicking of their teeth. They blew on their coffee and browsed for books ten feet from a line of police vehicles that sat empty, ready to take them away. To meet their ends, they lay down outside in rain and sleet, under tarps or whatever else they could find. Tapped phones didn’t deter them, neither did the surveillance of their meetings, nor did the provocateurs who showed up so diligently it seemed that they, like everyone else, had no sick leave from their jobs.

In twenty-first-century America, we work hard to maintain a status quo that doesn’t serve us. Perhaps we do it from a sense of brotherhood: It is a democratic status quo and diminishes poor and rich alike. Our lives are predetermined by our material circumstances. The roles we are forced to play based on accidents of birth limit and constrict our growth. The space the present has sold us to live in is so small that it leaves no room for air.

But the occupier exhorts us to step out of our cells. It must be that men and women from the future are not subject to the rigors of closed doors. They claim we do not even need a key to open them; the doors have always stood ajar. In the park, people took on jobs and roles according to need and not duress. They worked at the jobs they wanted to work at, in the fashion they wanted to work at them. Occupiers relate organically to time; an occupier is alive in all the moments of her life, not only those times when she is off the clock.

However, their virtues are not only inward-directed; occupiers are also compassionate. Occupiers fight negligence in all its forms. They take care of the homeless and indigent within their ranks even when it is difficult to do so. They work to bring health and safety to people who have none. Even the chronically ill were looked after in the park, in spite of those who said that this work compromised the movement.

The occupation countered America’s false sense of scarcity with the truth of plenty. We are a very rich country, they remind us, and no one has to suffer from want. Occupiers amassed enough food and clothing and housing for groups of great numbers, and they showed us that we might continue indefinitely, if only we care to. There is enough, in fact, for everyone, and by everyone an occupier has the brass to mean the whole planet. They challenge us with the question: What reason can we find not to be generous, when we can afford to be so easily?

But it is easy to see that an occupier would be generous even if he couldn’t afford it. Kindness is a primary occupier virtue; kindness is a political platform. Though the people of twenty-first-century America might flinch at the sound of this idealism, an occupier shows us by his actions a practical implementation.

Of course we flinch! We’ve been led to believe that bamboozlement is inevitable when we offer our help. Everyone knows there is a vulnerability on both sides of that kind of transaction, but when an occupier offers a stranger ice cream, poisoning is not a foregone conclusion. In fact, the stranger finds that the ice cream tastes very good. But even when his generosity is badly received, the occupier himself will tell us that the impulse to be generous wasn’t wrong. Occupiers show us that generosity is not a synonym for weakness. To offer of oneself, whether the offer is accepted or rebuffed, is to be strong.

Moreover, security doesn’t come from pathological self-protection. An occupier is a good judge of character because her business is conducted eye-to-eye. She cannot put institutions over individuals because for an occupier, there are only people, there are no institutions. An institution cannot stand in front of you. You cannot have coffee with the Federal Reserve. The knuckling under to endless bureaucracy has stifled our ability to make decisions and our ability to protect ourselves. It is this that has made us timid and gullible. An occupier is neither timid nor gullible.

Occupiers have no truck with bullshit; they neither give it nor receive it. Over the present hangs a miasma of euphemisms, lies and prevarications. Words are garbled and contorted by political parties, corporations, and the full spectrum of the media. In fact, anyone who can get a hand on language puts screws to the idea of meaning itself. “Natural” is the vague term used when you want to pack your product with chemicals. Corporations claim to sponsor human emotions and human relations. The reading level of the newspaper drops a grade every few years.

That vaporous substance inside us—however you would describe the soul—is in danger of being blown away entirely by the squall of modern life. An onslaught of products and false responsibilities, the unrelenting drudgery of our jobs, and the speed at which we are forced to travel through our days—all this threatens to disperse us. Whatever our heart has to offer is drugged away, and just as it is with the presence of our physical bodies, the expression of emotions is considered barbaric. To feel pain and heartache and to suffer in consequence, to be sentimental, to want things that are not material, to age, to be mortal—all these things are barbarisms. To mourn the death of your own beloved for too long is mental illness. But an occupier mourns the death of his beloved.

When will our present America age to meet these virtues and these people who embody them? At what point—what specific year—will we be in hailing distance of this future spot in time?

Past the crises of a parboiled globe, nuclear meltdown, economic chaos and depravity. Past starvation, public libraries and hospitals gone. Past children educated not into freedom but only into slavishness. Past the whine and hum of a capitalism that grinds up the bones of the third world and sells the grindings back for bread. Past American workers left in towns whose only product is meth. Past permanent eternal war, on the other side of apocalypse and misery. This is the future from which they come. In their time, people rebuild with the planks and detritus left to them and find that it is plenty. They need bravery and resilience, and so they have it. They need camaraderie and patience, and they have that, too.

But why wait to rebuild until then? Why not cross over now, immediately, through this perforation in time, bypassing calamity and despair?

This future America . . . here it is. Somehow it has slipped back to us, filled with its free people, blithe within their new bones and new blood, new sinew, new synapses, like our own in form, but somehow entirely different. Unbent where we are bent, poured full with hope where we are empty of it. They would have us rebuild not later but now.

Is their future distant or near? The fact that they are here at all tells us that it is easy to get to. The gulf is narrow. It is nothing to cross, and if you look, they are holding out their hands to us.

Olivia Schanzer