Why Lists of Demands Don’t Matter in Zuccotti Park

[EFerrari]

Why Lists of Demands Don’t Matter in Zuccotti Park
by Tom Engelhardt

In some ways, Zuccotti Park, the campsite, the Ground Zero, for the Occupy Wall Street protests couldn’t be more modest. It’s no Tahrir Square, but a postage-stamp-sized plaza at the bottom of Manhattan only blocks from Wall Street. And if you arrive before noon, you’re greeted not by vast crowds, but by air mattresses, a sea of blue and green tarps, a couple of information tables, some enthusiastic drummers, enough signs with slogans for anything you care to support (“Too big to fail is too big to allow,” “The American Dream: You have to be asleep to believe it,” “There’s no state like no state,” etc.), and small groups of polite, eager, well-organized young people, wandering, cleaning, doling out contributed food, dealing with the press, or sitting in circles on the concrete, backpacks strewn about, discussing. If it were the 1960s, it might easily be a hippie encampment.

But don’t be fooled. Not only does the park begin to fill fast and the conversation become ever more animated, but this movement already spreading across the country (and even globally) looks like the real McCoy, something new and hopeful in degraded times. Of the demonstrators I spoke with, several had hitchhiked to New York -- one had simply quit her job -- to be present. Inspired by Tunisians, Egyptians, Spaniards, and Wisconsinites, in a country largely demobilized these last years, they recognized what matters when they saw it. As one young woman told me, “A lot of people in my generation felt we were going to witness something really big -- and I think this is it!” They may not be the perfect size and shape for the movement of everyone’s dreams, but they’re here and, right now, that says the world.

It may be. The last time we saw a moment like this globally was 1968. (Other dates, like 1848 in Europe and 1919 in China, when the young took the lead in a previously dead world, also come to mind.) It’s the moment when the blood stirs and the young, unable to bear the state of their country or the world, hit the streets with the urge to take the fate of humankind in their own hands.

It’s always unexpected. No one predicted Tahrir Square. No one imagined tens of thousands of young Syrians, weaponless, facing the military might of the state. No one expected the protests in Wisconsin. No one, myself included, imagined that young Americans, so seemingly somnolent as things went from bad to worse, would launch such a spreading movement, and -- most important of all -- decide not to go home. (At the last demonstration I attended in New York City in the spring, the median age was probably 55.)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/06-7

[truedelphi]

1. When the Big Corporations want something - it is always reduced to one meme:

Factor X is very very very very scary - so GIVE US EVERYTHING!

Doesn't matter about the truthiness of any of it - From Weapons of Mass Destruction to "If they fail, no one in America will ever have a job again!" - the American public is always told to hand it all over. They themselves and their young adult children fight the wars based on lies. They give up their prosperity for that of Wall Street.

So my feeling is "So what if the protesters don't have one BIG SCARY MEME?"

Because the protesters' message can't be reduced down to one anything. It is a complex, octopoid of a scenario - that the Biggest Financial Firms seeing to it that the tax code favors them. That the Bailout Money went to them. That they own most of congress and much of the energy emanating from the Oval Office, through the campaign funding that they offer everyone who runs for office.

And the wars favor the Biggest Financial Firms also, as the money for arming our Armed Services has to be loaned from their vaults to the Pentagon's bean counters who pay the bills for war.

It will take at least as much imagination as was needed by the blind men describing an elephant - to represent what is needed.

But as many protesting are saying, "We want our country back."