occupiers in washington square, NYC, 10-8-11
Watching the Occupiers as their numbers mushroom, as the cities they occupy proliferate, is really a flashback to the sixties. It’s the same kind of movement – grass roots, organic, spurred by an emotional and intuitive certainty that something is very wrong in this country. And when enough people feel this, the masses take to the streets. And when the 99% take to the streets in such great numbers, the media snaps to attention, even the politicians who live on the planet Pluto can’t help but notice.
Some media outlets have criticized this movement because it doesn’t have, well, you know, an agenda. In media speak, that means: What are the talking points? What’s the declaration? Who are your leaders? Who speaks for you? I actually think that in the beginning, the lack of an agenda was a plus. But now the movement is so much larger that it may be time to flex its political muscle.
During the protests of the sixties, the war in Vietnam was the issue. The draft still existed. People saw the draft as sanctioned murder. We also had great music that infused us with a kind of primal rage toward a system that we knew was unjust and plain wrong.
On May 4, 1970, four college students at Kent State were murdered by the National Guard during a protest. Here’s a timeline of the events that led up to this horror. As a result of this travesty, on May 9, 1970, 100,000 marched on Washington, D.C. to protest the shootings and Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, which many of us saw as an expansion of the Vietnam War.
On the night of May 8, 1970, I drove my old VW from Utica, New York to D.C. and it was jammed with people. We were three deep in the front seat, four in the back. In those days, the trip took about eight hours. I remember that we camped that night in a park with hundreds of other protestors. The people I was with had come well-prepared – food and water, sleeping bags, even pillows, and, more importantly, they had handkerchiefs coated with Vaseline, which was supposed to protect you from tear gas or whatever else might be sprayed through the crowd.
That night, as I looked out across the park where we all camped illegally, I could see pinpricks of light – cigarettes, candles, flashlights –and knew I was a witness to history, that something important was shifting. The next day, as a hundred thousand of us converged on D.C., I saw only a sea of humanity. I heard the cacophony of a collective voice that you can hear now from the occupiers of wherever you live. Their message is layered – not just war, but economical tyranny of the 1 percent, the domination of corporatism at the expense of everyone else, unemployment, class warfare, corrupt politicians. But really, the bigger message is the same: the existing paradigm no longer works. Capitalism is now a monster.
Back then, we didn’t have the Internet, Facebook, cell phones, Twitter. We were a disconnected, disenfranchised group and we knew it, and it didn’t matter. We were connected by something deeper, more mysterious, a passion that knew no bounds. Just like the occupiers.
And yet, even after that protest in 1970, it took three more years before military involvement in Vietnam ceased and until April 1975 for the war to officially end. I was in graduate school when the military involvement ended. I remember being in the apartment of a friend and caught a snippet on TV and thought, Wow, what was this about again? Nearly 60,000 Americans killed, more than a million others, I mean, really, what was the point?
Now, more than forty years later, what has changed? War is still big business, but there’s no more draft. The U.S. is still the world cop, we support dictators and supply them with weapons, only to turn against them when the tide of pubic opinion has turned. For a list of such dictators and the policies that support them, Google Naomi Klein. She wrote the definitive book about these American tactics in The Shock Doctrine. Economist Paul Krugman nails it, too.
My hope is that the occupiers continue to occupy, that those vested in the existing paradigm keep howling about how un-American it is, and that the change doesn’t take 3-5 years. One thing is obvious: the existing paradigm won’t end with a whimper. The 1 percent will fight the 99 percent all the way. But if we’re a country of the people and for the people, change will come. The 99 percent will win.














