I attended the Occupy Wall Street teach-in with my English class on Thursday, November 17th, hoping to get a better perspective about Occupy Wall Street. I confess that because I have been busy with so many other things, I haven’t had the time to seriously examine the movement as extensively as I know I, a member of the “99%”, should have.
The Teach-In was not as helpful as I thought it would be. I wanted to learn exactly how and why the movement started, and why it only decided to take wing on September 17th, when it can be argued that big corporations and billionaires have been wronging the middle and lower classes for decades. Instead, it seemed to be an endless shouting match between our two student hosts, who, in piercingly loud and aggressive voices, tried to show their audience of roughly fifty why we all belong in the 99% and what the government is doing to us.
I felt a bit awkward sitting there and feeling none of the passion and fervor the student hosts felt. Their aggressive way of speaking made me want to tune them out more than listen. Their attempts to roleplay people on the particularly low spectrum of the 99% were more comical than informative, mostly because of the bad acting and use of a tie to help disguise a white girl as a middle-aged black man.
After being flooded with all of these ideas and all of this information about how much the government has been wronging us, I wondered if there was something wrong with me. How could I, who used to be such a passionate lover of the 1960’s and hippie counterculture, be so disinterested in the Occupy Wall Street movement? I may be part of the 99%, but I feel that I think like a 1%-er. I have no desire to join these protesters, and most of the time they simply annoy me.
I checked out the OWS Tumblr page, which consisted of hundreds of 99%-ers’ pictures and their individual stories. I found that I had very little in common with these people. All of them were experiencing much harder times than my family and I have ever faced: most of them were in heavy debt from college and credit card bills, many did not have health insurance, and in general, were in a much lower economic standing than my family and I. My family is by no means rich, but we are definitely more fortunate than the people I saw on this Tumblr page. Both of my parents work, we all have health insurance, being a Macaulay student means I have no college loans to pay off, and we have a house and live comfortably. It is perhaps for these reasons that I don’t feel particularly “cheated” by big corporations like the OWS protesters do. In this way, I see my comfortable living as a sort of curse. I want to understand where they are coming from. I want to really understand how difficult life is for these people, but my social and economic standing doesn’t permit me to – or not as fully as I would like to.
I will say that the Occupy Wall Street movement does have a poignant resonance that can be connected to the visual and performing arts. The arts are definitely a big part of the OWS movement in the same way it was part of the civil rights/anti-war movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Just on the news this morning, I saw that the protesters have moved to Gracie Mansion and are planning to keep up a communal drumming session for 24 hours. A singer-songwriter I follow on Twitter, Amanda Palmer, has frequented Zucotti Park numerous times and has performed her famous “Ukulele Anthem” with the protesters. The connections of Occupy Wall Street to art are endless, though I wouldn’t say that they are synonymous, mostly because I don’t strongly support the movement to begin with. In the same way that a painting or a piece of art makes a statement, however, it cannot be denied that the OWS movement is making a very strong statement. The fact that so many thousands of people can come together when it is so easy for modern technology to isolate us is truly remarkable. If the Occupy Wall Street movement will show us anything at all, it will show us that it is still possible for people to truly come together for a common cause; that activism is not dead.
Sites accessed:
OccupiedWallStreetJournal.com
Wearethe99percent.tumblr.com
One of the real problems of the 99% is that there are many people who have been living beyond their means, and are now in trouble. Should we really have sympathy for someone who is “underwater” on their mortgage, driving a car they can’t afford and is forced to give up the dream of an expensive vacation? Much of the agenda of the 99% seems to be about the haves and the have mores.
Could you make these sites at the bottom of the page actual links? If you don’t remember how, you can re-read the “Adding Links” tech tutorial.