Part 5 (2/2)

CHAPTER 14

GOING TO THE STREETS TO GET THINGS DONE

RALPH NADER

What took the-these jobless, poor, voiceless, excluded, defrauded, disrespected, fed up thousands, who are learning that half of what de-in this case-in the parks and the streets? Isn't that the lesson of American history?

The plutocrats of Wall Street and the oligarchs who serve theton, DC, always sweat a little when people are in the streets That is what happened during the drive to get woanized demonstrators of farmers and workers in the latter half of the nineteenth century Later it was the e of restraint and retreat to the bosses and launched the hts, environmental, and peace h the mass media's adhesion to status-quo definitions of news It is unpredictable, visual, and flares when police overreact It is hard to ignore, especially when the Internet is already actively reporting and conation of engaged real people with real stories of injustice, deprivation, and e These personal declarations, day after day, are harder to ignore than siazines, and docu here, there, and everywhere in coy Mass y-people new to the causes that old-line groups have espoused e presidential can rally in October 2008 in front of the New York Stock Exchange, during the crash, was largely ignored-except for an article in The New York Times) There are ti with the potential to put rassroots perturbations

Already, the Occupy encae toith a core still near Wall Street-have shown that the people have a pulse; that they have breaking points beyond which they will not remain passive

The ca that they have power-the crucial first stage of liberation fro up powerless and under corporate doether-into a process of self-realization They are together finding talents and skills, temperaments and visions, resilience and deterht they had

The Wall Street fat cats, in their private conversations,how a collapsed econoht s, and a taxpayer-funded bailout of the crooks and speculators who continue bad practices without remorse could persist without sustained protests by the victie of their answer

We can be certain that the power structure is now analyzing theup this decentralized, leaderless, growing occupation of the peoples' co” (to borrow a phrase from the 1960s) The corporate supremacists and their political allies will, of course, rely first on police power to clear the spaces and the tents That will only serve to provoke even greater numbers of people to join the pioneers What comes next is unknown, but it is ency plans are already on the drawing board to thwart a civicvery serious indeed

Occupy Wall Street and its overnment, university, and union circles, who have been self-censoring, to take the next step to speak out and stand tall This is what happened in the 1960s-first with civil rights and then with the anti-Vietnaes that liberated islation protecting consu the Occupy challengers today, consider such penu other efforts for justice that unite around the need to shi+ft power fro with the many resources that come with that dynamic

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, author, and for

CHAPTER 15

THE OCCUPATION OF HOPE:

LETTER TO A DEAD MAN

REBECCA SOLNIT

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Moha year-with three months yet to run I want to tell you about the power of despair and the ins of hope and the bonds of civil society

I wish you could see the way that your se death became a catalyst for the fall of so

We are now in some sort of an Around running, and we are all headed toward a future no one ietable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine an Your death teeks later would be the beginning of so much You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so feers, even the power toor protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the drea the 99

And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its governht fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where the nonviolent protests elsewhere inspired a civil war the rebels have won after several bloody ined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the uniain And almost everywhere

Distinctively, in so s the participants were not advocating for one party or a sinity, for respect, for real de, for hope and possibility-and their econo whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and ere nicknanados, lived in the plazas of Spain this summer Occupied Madrid, like occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizenry occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks Now the Occupy movement has spilled over fro all over North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, in Victoria and Fort Lauderdale

The 99

”We are the 99” is the cry of the Occupy movement This summer, one of the flyers that helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protest read: ”We, the 99, call for an open general asseust 9, 7:30 pm at the Potato Famine Memorial, NYC” It was an assembly to discuss the Septeer Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland reentry continued to profit It's a monument to the exploitation of the many by the few, to the forces that turned sorandparents-into i people out of farions The Irish fareat examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and has an abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food-so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution Everyone could have everything they need and the rich would still be rich enough, but you know that enough isn't a concept for therab for more has carved away at what's nity of the rest of us So the Famine Memorial couldn't have been a in

Later in August caht-year-old New York City activist, ”We Are the 99,” to which hundreds daily now subraphs of themselves Each of them also testifies to the bleak conditions they find thehtmares, economic bad dreams that a little wealth redistribution would eli the wealthy) The people contributing aren't asking for luxuries They would simply prefer not to be worked to death like so many nineteenth centurydown if they get sick They want to survive with dignity, and their testioods in the hands of politicians and bankers,” was the slogan of the first student protest called in Spain this year Your beautiful generation, Moha, even here in the United States

What is Your Occupation?

Occupy Wall Street Occupy together Occupy New Orleans, Portland, Stockton, Boston, Las Cruces, Minneapolis Occupy The very word is a manifesto, a position statement, and a position as well For so many people, their occupation is their identity, and when a job is lost, they become not just unemployed, but no one The Occupy movement offers them a new occupation, work that won't pay the bills, but a job worth doing ”Lost n in the crowd of witty signs

There is, of course, a bleakerfor the word occupation, as in, ”the United States is occupying Iraq” Even National Public Radio gives the Dow Jones report several tih the rise and fall of the stock o been decoupled fro for the 99 A s occupied us as if it were a foreign power, is now occupied as though it were a foreign country

Wall Street is a foreign country-and maybe an enemy country as well And now it's occupied The way that Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisoby for eighteen alvanized a national Native Ahts movement You pick someplace to stand, and when you stand there, you find your other occupation, as a member of civil society At this moment in history, occupation should be everyone's occupation

Baby Pictures of a Revolt

Young ave birth to hope, no one knohat the future holds When you set yourself afire alo, you certainly didn't know, nor do any of us knohat the long-ter will be, let alone this American Fall Such a movement arrives in the world like a newborn Who knows its fate, or even whether it will survive to grow up? Zuccotti Park is just two blocks from Wall Street, and also just a block from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks On that day, it was badly daed September 21, my dear friend Marina Sitrin wrote me from Occupy Wall Street: ”There are people froroups, including not just a few children here with their parents, and a nu people frouards fro by for lunch and chatting with people, as has a local group of construction workers”

If the Arab Spring was the decade-later antithesis of 9/11, a largely nonviolent, publicly inclusive revolt that forced the Western world to get over its fearful fantasy that all young Muslims are terrorists, jihadis, and suicide boan six days after the tenth anniversary of that nightmarish day in September, is the other half of 9/11 in New York What was reo is how calmly and beautifully everyone behaved New Yorkers helped each other down those dozens of flights of stairs in the Twin Towers and away froive blood, desperate to do so, to participate, to be part of a new-found sense of coan to study the history of urban disaster years ago, I found such unexpected exhibitions of that kind of joy again and again, uniting the generative moments of protests, demonstrations, revolts, and revolutions with the aftermath of some disasters Even when the losses were terrible, the ways that people ca