The #Occupy movement and the generations

Just a short note of gratitude and no small amount of incredulity at the cross-generational dialogues that have been fostered through and around the Occupy movement, which I and others view as largely a Millenial generation-driven thing.  I was just reading a well-done post by Charles B. Pierce at Esquire’s Politics Blog and noting his tone lamenting the political fecklessness of many of those from his generation now holding the reins of power:

How hard can this be? How hard is it to tell people to get angry at the people who really are making off with their country's wealth and their personal futures, especially when it's the god's honest truth? How hard is it to tell people that they are not the enemy, that to shoot pepper spray into the eyes of a college student is to spit in the eye of everyone else? Please do not hand me concerns for your "political viability." That makes you cowards. The protesters are doing the hard work. They're the ones living in a dozen tiny Argentinas all around this country. They're the ones getting beaten up and tortured, on TV, with chemical agents. They're the ones going to jail. All I'm asking is that you all have their backs, and all you have to do is get up and give a whole bunch of speeches saying so. Right now, they're pretty much out their on an island while empty charlatans like Newt Gingrich and prissy little shmoes like David Brooks are beating them over the head rhetorically, while the cops are more than happy — indeed, damned near gleeful — to do it in person.

Barney Frank wonders where the Occupiers were during the elections of 2010? Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they'll show up. This does not seem to me to be a difficult problem, but it does appear possibly to be the last chance for progressive politics for an awfully long time. You don't need an $850,000 contract to see that.

That second bolded sentence “Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they’ll show up” sounds like one of the best lines I’ve heard this year, for both its succinct razor-edge of truth, to its political astuteness.  This generation out protesting, my generation, is the one that greatly helped President Obama get elected.  We came out of the Bush era scarred (as I’ve noted previously) and looking for a change that Obama appeared to represent.  But more than that, he represented prudent judgment in correctly sizing up many of the true threats to our country (the undercutting of civil liberties domestically and human rights abroad, being cogent for me in particular) and, yes, a courage in his opposition to the Iraq War that was greatly lacking in the politics of those days, and even moreso today.  The reality of President Obama has been drastically different from the representation of Candidate Obama, but at the time, he showed a side of politics that people yearned for.  Show us courageous politicians taking stands that put them on the right side of popular sentiment, particularly in the face of a potential loss of big money campaign donors, and I bet my generation will show up.

So it is with that background in mind that I have been considering the amount of support I see and hear from older generations for the movement now sweeping America.  A close family member informed me that on her recent trip to New York she happened upon an Occupy Wall Street group at a public park (not Zuccotti, mind you) and was very impressed with the “human microphone” and the positive, steadfast energy the group displayed, despite it being an awful, rainy NYC November day.  The Facebook posts I see from Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, and on up regarding the Occupy Movement evince a strong bond between the generations that I don’t think I’ve ever seen as clearly in my life. 

I had always feared that the elites’ plan to divide the entitlement program pie, and to set those of us in younger generations on a different retirement plan than our parents, threatened to separate the generations (which is probably the point!) and why you still hear many GOP candidates discussing giving young people the “option” of purchasing health savings accounts and the like.  The fact that we’re all working and saving towards a common fund, a common vision, means we’re all in it together, to some extent, despite the fact that the powers-that-be want all that locked-up Social Security and Medicare money to be released to the predations and speculations of Wall Street. 

But now, the elites have played their hand too far.  They’ve effectively united a strong bloc of people across the generations because, let’s face it, we’ve all been looted in some way or another.  We recognize a common enemy: the collusion between big business and big government that works to undercut our rights and to separate an already economically-stratified society into one where you have vastly different justice systems, depending on your standing and net worth (witness this egregious hit-and-run case from Colorado last year involving a “wealth manager” and a cyclist for a great/horrifying example).  There’s no justice for those on the top, but a harsh and exacting justice for those of us not at the top.  Witness the UC Davis pepper-spraying last Friday:

Glenn Greenwald’s take on the UC Davis situation adroitly points towards the larger issue at play in our society:

The UC-Davis Chancellor responsible for the pepper-spraying of her students, Linda Katehi, today went on Good Morning America and explained why she should not resign or otherwise be held accountable: “we really need to start the healing process and move forward.” On a radio program in the afternoon, she expanded on this view by saying: “We need to move on.” So apparently — yet again — the only way everyone can begin to “heal” and “move forward” is if everyone agrees that those in power with the greatest responsibility be fully shielded from any consequences and that their bad acts be simply forgotten. I wonder where she learned that justifying rationale?

We yearn for justice as a society.  The concept of justice embedded in the Constitution argues that those at the top and those at the bottom ought to be equal in the eyes of the law, and yet, the past decade has clearly shown how far our society has gotten from those founding principles.  Occupy, for all of its media-unfriendliness and potential to turn off the “median voter,” is a nascent attempt at reclaiming that original concept of justice.  Justice is anathema to the powers-that-be, as their gains are largely ill-gotten and their positions in society often depend on their being the the best operators within a system of legalized corruption.  The moment their hold on power slips, and they no longer control the levers of power and the judiciary, they will be subject to the comeuppance that has been long in coming, and much delayed. 

Greenwald quotes Rosa Luxemburg’s epic comment to wonderful effect:

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

If you look askance at the Occupy movement, and you see nothing but a bunch of rowdy young people lacking drive and ambition, ask yourself how you’re constrained in your own life.  What cutbacks have you had to make to your hopes and dreams, let alone your financial position?  How many of those setbacks are due entirely to your own poor judgment or over-extension, rather than being at least in part the shock wave from a system of willfully-created asset bubbles and legislatively-endorsed corruption imploding upon itself?  If you trace the origins of your own problems back to their logical starting points, do they solely originate from your decisions?  That is the line of thinking the powers-that-be hope you’ll take away.  Heaven forbid you should look up the food chain to discover how usury has been made legal and how student loans are no longer discharged in bankruptcy; how insolvent banks are allowed to claim the full face value of toxic assets to bolster their bottom lines, and yet how lying to get food stamps to feed one’s two children can net you 3 years in federal prison.  “Justice,” these days, comes at the expense of the rest of us.  We can see this fact in all its harsh reality and find a unity in it, or we can deny deny deny that the mirror the Occupy movement is holding up to our society reflects far more of our collective life experiences of brokenness and unnecessary misery than we’d care to admit. 

Thank you to those of the older generations who see the Occupy movement not as a threat, but as the opportunity for a rebirth.  We need you, and you need us.  We ARE in this together.