When I was in university, a cool guy who was an activist/folk singer asked me out on a picnic. He picked me up, and we drove slowly through an affluent neighbourhood, stopping in front of a very grand house. “Let’s eat in the backyard,” he said. “Is this your parents’ home?” I asked, confused. “No,” he replied,” I don’t know who owns it, but the land belongs to all of us, doesn’t it? So we have every right to eat on it.”
I spent the whole time nervously looking around, waiting for the cops to arrive, and was as relieved to be dropped back at my apartment as he no doubt was to say goodbye to a date who had not yet cast off the rules of the bourgeoisie.
This memory popped unbidden into my head when I read about the Occupy Wall Street movement, a series of protests that are coming to Toronto and Vancouver this weekend. It started small last month, with a couple of hundred protesters in Manhattan, gathering in Zuccotti Park near the financial district, coming together to form a “leaderless,” nonviolent community, sleeping over and attempting to draw attention, with no set of specific demands, to many of America’s ills, economic, environmental and political.
At one point protesters paraded on the Upper East Side, past the homes of the rich and famous. Were they imagining their own picnics on property that did not belong to them? More likely they were protesting the ongoing picnic that some of the most wealthy financiers have been enjoying at the rest of society’s expense.
In fact the real question about the exciting, disturbing, sometimes baffling and definitely growing Occupy Wall Street movement is not, what do they actually want, but what took them so long?
Conditions have been ripe in the U.S. for some kind of pro-democracy movement that focuses on the growing gap between the tiny percentage of people who keep getting richer – what the demonstrators call the 1 per cent
That’s supposedly the rest of the populace (although we know the numbers are more nuanced) stymied by a staggering unemployment rate, a politically bankrupt congress that can’t pass a jobs bill (“No Jobs Bill and No Ideas” ran a recent gloomy headline in The New York Times), the shameful fact that the financial masters who presided over this financialmess are still in many cases benefiting from it, and an economic prognosis that offers up not glittering futures for the young, but more of the same.
As filmmaker Michael Moore, looking pleased as punch that his exhortations in his film Capitalism: A Love Story have given rise to some street action, said in an interview after he visited the demonstrators: “
Trying to understand Occupy Wall Street is keeping commentators overcaffeinated. New York Times columnist David Brooks loftily declared that the Occupy movement “
