Rebuild the Dream (19 page)

First of all, similar to the Tea Party movement, the Occupiers communicated emotionally resonant messages, functioned as a swarm, used an open source brand, benefitted from widely distributed support centers, and leveraged social media. I will discuss all of these elements, in great detail, in Section II of this book.

Here, I will discuss six other factors that contributed to Occupy's success: the cleverness and utility of the Occupy and 99% memes, the timing of the protests, the use of encampments, the
smart relationship to the “demand for demands,” the decision to remain decentralized, and the movement's early commitment to nonviolence.

The verb
occupy
is versatile; it lends itself to many uses and therefore multiplies itself easily—Occupy This Town, Occupy That Problem, et cetera. And in a particularly brilliant breakthrough, someone came up with the idea to identify the victims and heroes in the drama being enacted as the “99%.” As a result, today anyone can say “99%,” and millions of people immediately understand it as shorthand for those on the downside of huge wealth disparities created by decades of corporate greed and big money corruption of our political system. For twenty years, my colleagues in the social justice movement have been trying to highlight these issues and draw attention to them. We have used all kinds of terms—fairness and equity and so on. But a set of newcomers came up with the winner right out of the box: the 99%. . . . Bingo.

The movement's timing was perfect. In economic terms, the American people had reached their pain threshold many months earlier, but they hit their threshold for political frustration only weeks earlier, when the Tea Party initially refused to let Congress raise the debt ceiling. The spectacle of Washington, DC, being held hostage by extremists in Congress convinced millions of people that the nation's capital was in the grip of too much insanity to send help to the rest of the country any time soon. Even though the politicians avoided a train crash, any remaining “hope” of politicians coming
to the rescue was gone. Millions were looking for a vehicle to express their outrage, pain, and disappointment.

The protests were heavily criticized for not having clear demands. But, in fact, it was the lack of demands that let the movement grow; anyone who felt aggrieved could get involved, feel ownership, and shape the demonstrations around their own sensibilities—without having to sign on to a particular set of policy solutions that Congress was not going to pass anyway. It was almost as if the demonstrators were saying, “You demand that we have demands. We have none. But if we had any demands, we would demand that you stop demanding demands from us—and instead demand accountability from the 1 percent, who created this mess with their own demands. We would like to help you fix your system. But we are busy creating our own.”

The nature of the protest—a permanent, public, physical encampment—showed keen insight into the nature of today's media system. The demonstrators recognized that our society has a twenty-four-hour news cycle now. Therefore, they created a twenty-four-hour protest tactic. Unlike most political activists, Occupiers did not decide to march or rally for a few hours and then hurry home to watch themselves on TV. Instead, they set up shop and stayed there for weeks on end; it was clear that they were prepared to stay indefinitely. This kind of tactic guaranteed that Occupy Wall Street would capture media attention. If the city officials decided to let them stay, that would make the news. If the city officials kicked them out, that would make news, too.

The high level of decentralization was also a source of success. Occupy Wall Street is arguably the most decentralized political movement yet seen in America, with a wide geographic spread and a mindboggling number of creative talents rushing to affiliate themselves with the brand. These creatives churned out hundreds of thousands of videos, photos, and blogs, poems, tweets, and infographics.

Writer Micah Sifry wrote movingly on his
TechPresident
blog about the “leader-full-ness” of Occupy:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is, in fact, leader-full. That is, the insistent avoidance of traditional top-down leadership and the reliance on face-to-face and peer-to-peer networks and working groups creates space for lots of leaders to emerge, but only ones that work as network weavers rather than charismatic bosses. . . .

Everything about our industrial age institutions, from schools and churches to corporations and government, trains us to think of leadership as top-down, command-and-control. Give the right answer, get into the right school, get a good job, work your way up the chain of command, win the good life. But today, more and more of us live in a sea of lateral social connections, enabled by personal technology that is allowing everyone to connect and share, in real-time, what matters most to them. And at a moment when so many traditional political institutions appear bankrupt, incapable of reforming themselves and paralyzed in the face of huge challenges, the result is an explosion of outsider movements for social change. . . .

Adjusting to a leaderful world full of self-starting network weavers, transparent and accountable about their actions—from
a world of top-down leaders who use hierarchy, secrecy and spin to conduct their business, will take some getting used to. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, like the Tea Party before it was captured and turned into a marketing vehicle for the Republican right, represents the flowering of something very deep about our networked age. It is personal democracy in action, where everyone plays a role in shaping the decisions that affect our lives. We may face huge challenges, but while some of our material resources are in scarce supply, we have an abundance of leaders coming.

Not only have these young people won allies because their authentic expressions of pain, frustration, and outrage resonate, but they have also won allies because they adhered initially to the principles of nonviolence.

We must not forget the story of the first major challenge Occupiers faced, which was on September 24, 2011. They had been occupying Zuccotti Park for about one week, but they had failed to win the serious support of major politicians, major nonprofit organizations, or unions. The media seemed bemused by them; most ignored them. City officials decided to clear them out.

A notorious New York police officer named Anthony Bologna, perhaps feeling confident that these young people had no support, approached two young women whom police had already penned in. The women were just standing there. They had nowhere to go, and they were posing no threat to anyone. They weren't even holding signs. The officer reached into his belt and pulled out his canister of pepper spray, a dangerous weapon that was originally
designed as a bear repellent. Unlike mace, pepper spray is a resin that sticks to the skin and burns. It is powerful enough to stop a grizzly in its tracks.

Unprovoked, the officer sprayed the pepper spray directly into the young women's faces and eyes. They fell to their knees, screaming. In response to this provocation, some protesters might have surged forward to fight back violently against the unlawful violence being directed at them. But not one of them did. Nobody threw a punch; nobody threw a bottle. Everyone present maintained nonviolent discipline.

Fortunately, someone captured the entire incident with a video camera and uploaded it on the Internet for the world to see. A global audience was horrified by the lunacy and barbarity of the police officer—and awed by the courage and wisdom of the young protesters.

The demonstrators were interviewed later and said, in essence:
We just want everybody to know we're not fighting against the police. We're fighting for them. We're concerned about their pensions. We're concerned about their children. The police are a part of the 99%, too.

The world could see in this one gesture the seeds of a morally grounded and deeply resonant movement, one perhaps reminiscent of the best of the nonviolent movements of the 1960s. The Occupiers' guts and grace summoned luminaries such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Russell Simmons, Mark Ruffalo, and Cornel West.

A few episodes of property destruction at other sites would put a dent in Occupy's image. But for anyone who was willing to look, the fundamental commitment to peaceful tactics kept shining through. It was a key source of the movement's broad appeal.

America and the world owe a great debt to Occupy Wall Street for making the problem of economic inequality impossible to ignore.

Before we move on, I want to clarify a few terms that I have been using in this book. I see two identities—or brands—that have come out of the wave of protests that originated on Wall Street. In casual discourse, they are often used interchangeably. I want to suggest that there is an important distinction between them.

The first term is “Occupy.” I use this term primarily to refer to the approximately two hundred thousand folks across the country who have camped out, protested, and/or attended the consensus-based, mass meetings known as general assemblies. As I use the term, it also includes those who have started special spin-off projects that use Occupy in the name. But in general, the Occupiers are the frontline crusaders. They push the envelope. They put their bodies on the line. They often engage in direct action protests, like sitting in at banks. They endure arrests and, too often, police assaults.

Logically, only those who have gotten physically or directly involved can be called Occupiers. And only they can define what it means to belong to Occupy. Despite having visited the encampments in Manhattan, Boston, Los Angeles, Oakland, and elsewhere, I am not an Occupier, and I do not consider myself to be a part of the Occupy movement. This book does not in any way attempt to speak for Occupy Wall Street or the network of Occupy-themed groups that it has birthed. Fortunately, the Occupiers speak for themselves, write for themselves, and create digital media for themselves as well as anyone on the planet.

The second term is the “99%.” It identifies a group that is much larger, made up of untold millions of people. For example, according to polls, roughly 33 percent of the public supported the protests and sympathized with the concerns they placed on the front burner. That is almost 100 million people. I do include myself in this group. We were the people who spoke up for Occupy around the water cooler or the kitchen table. We posted updates about their actions to our social network feeds; we forwarded videos showing the police brutality; some of us even attended one of the larger marches or rallies. But most of us never slept overnight at an encampment. Few of us were willing to take a bullet—even a rubber one—for the cause in the fall of 2011. I did not Occupy—
and
I cannot be thankful enough to the people who did and do.

And yet, going forward, it is the rest of us—who did not pitch tents, participate in the assemblies, or risk arrest—who must step into the space that the Occupy and other protests have blown open. Our choices will have a decisive impact on the success or failure of the overall movement to renew the economy and save America's working and middle classes.

The relationship between the two entities—Occupy Wall Street and the 99%—has a precedent. The civil rights movement was not the monolithic effort under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that history has made of it. For example, members of the young, upstart faction, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), were sometimes called the “shock troops of the movement.” They risked their lives integrating lunch counters, registering black voters, and taking “freedom rides” on buses through the segregated South. Occupy is much like SNCC—made up almost entirely of the most courageous, committed, and determined fighters for change. The 99% movement is like the civil rights movement—broad enough to encompass elements, tactics, and voices that extended from the moderate to the radical.

SNCC's members did not always agree with the politics of Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Coalition. But ultimately the internal push-pull only strengthened the movement and led to its groundbreaking achievements.

It is important to respect the distinction between the two identities. Having space between the two may give those who are still on the fence—those who feel squeamish about the tents and drum circles—the entry point they need to get more involved. It should be okay for many Americans to feel ambivalent about the tactics or optics of Occupy while simultaneously adopting and adapting the broader 99% identity and joining the fight for the future. And moving forward, this distinction should also allow for many more people to get involved in clarified goals and roles.