PREOCCUPIED
© 2011 Greek to Me by Michael Raysses
“Sometimes to stand up all you have to do is sit down.” —my Uncle Tasso on the Occupy Movement
Technology is one of those things I tend to keep at arm’s length for reasons that haven’t always been clear to me. Recently, though, I had an experience that shed some light on my misgivings around all things technological.
Standing in line at a local café, I fell into one of those mindless conversations you get into when you’re in line with nothing to do. I can’t remember the conditions that were responsible for my dilemma beyond this: I recall a couple of meaningless shared observations between me and the man next to me about the weather and the beauty of nature. The next thing I knew, he whipped out his cell phone. (I believe it was a Smartphone, but I am unwilling to ascribe attributes to inanimate objects when doing so gives them traits their owner doesn’t necessarily possess.) Suddenly, I was awash in a torrent of pictures from his latest vacation, replete with extensive extemporaneous captions for each. With each passing image, the glaze over my eyes hardened until my face froze into a mask of supplication—I just wanted out.
Now in the old days, if I was going to be exposed to pictures of dubious value, there were necessary red flags that forewarned me of my sorry fate. When I was a kid, for instance, my family spent the occasional Sunday afternoon visiting my Aunt Du-Du. Her apartment was a tribute to plastic. All of her furniture was wrapped in it, which made for considerable misery in the summer when I found myself literally stuck to her sofa because of the heat and humidity. The plastic motif was heightened by the polyurethane runners on her carpets, de facto runways that were there to keep kids from soiling her rugs. Crammed onto her couch, Aunt Du-Du would bring out boxes of old pictures from her youth; I felt like a bug that had been impaled and left dangling to die. But I knew all along I was going to be thusly stuck; a lengthy drive into Gary, the long walk up to her second floor apartment, the hushed exchange of greetings so as to not awaken the mysterious boarder who slept in the room at the end of the hall, were all prelude for what was to come. But thanks to technology, the heads-up that once signaled imminent exquisite boredom no longer exists.
Anyway, after the phantom photo-flasher claimed his drink and exited, I made a note to myself to write a monologue that would allow me to escape any such situation should it ever arise again. And though I have yet to finish that piece, I have been preoccupied with its message ever since.
Did you ever use a word and have it resonate with newfound meaning the minute you did? Because since September 17, using any form of the word ‘occupy’ gives me pause.
Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement for democracy that began in New York City on September 17 by squatting in an encampment in the financial district of Wall Street at Zuccotti Park. It seeks to end what it perceives as the moneyed corruption of American democracy by the corporatocracy. It is the result of the combined efforts of the Vancouver based anti-consumerist magazine, Adbusters, US Day of Rage, a collective of activist groups that is mainly Internet-based, and Anonymous, a group that exists within the Internet, fomenting active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain the anonymity of its members. The prism that focused these energies into the movement itself is the New York City General Assembly.
But that description barely traces the outline of a group that in a little over a month has gone from a faint blip on our culture’s radar to a national crusade that has spawned Occupy movements in over 149 cities domestically. Though the Occupy campaign may have hoped to inspire similar action elsewhere, no one could have foreseen that within four weeks, more than 900 cities around the world would host coordinated protests directly or loosely affiliated to the Occupy cause.
Not surprisingly, the movement hasn’t gone uncriticized. It’s been attacked for not having clear-cut goals, as well as for its lack of articulated leadership. Personally, I don’t find either of these criticisms valid. Right now the movement gets to take the time to frame its outrage beyond its sheer viscerality. As a group, they know that they have been abused, neglected, and marginalized by the very powers that have benefitted from doing so. That they have yet to delineate how they plan to combat that arrangement on a practical level makes sense to me. Effective action takes time to formulate.
As for the denunciation for its lack of specific leaders, I think that may be a stroke of inadvertent brilliance. The movement’s nonhierarchical structure rotates people through positions of leadership, thus ensuring that in the event any one person should be jailed or neutralized in some fashion, the movement won’t lose momentum for that loss.
The movement’s message is simple: the 1 percent on Wall Street has taken advantage of the 99 percent of the rest of us. This rings truer for me than any meme I have heard since the economic fire storm of 2008, of that I am 100 percent sure. The irony for me is that though I haven’t been able to actively participate in any of the movement’s efforts, technology has allowed me to support and stay abreast of it.
Because of the movement I am going to have to reconsider my technology monologue. From this point on, I am no longer merely preoccupied—I am now fully occupied. And that’s something I can wrap my arms around.
For information about Occupy Wall Street, go to www.occupywallst.org
Michael Raysses is a writer/NPR commentator/actor living in Los Angeles. E-mail him at MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.