Panta Rhei

Enough people ask me what I think will ultimately come of the Occupy movement that you'd think by now I'd have a nice, clean soundbite answer at the ready. But the truth is I don't and I probably won't until it's already come. The best I can offer is to point to other populist movements in history (while acknowledging that this particular movement is unique from anything we've experienced before), and note that our only role is to push as hard as possibly and allow the outside world to react. They can either read the writing on the wall, and try to diffuse this agitation with a big piece of compromise legislation (as FDR did with the New Deal to squelch the labor movement), or risk a full-blown uprising.

I do, however, know what I hope will come of Occupy: I hope we will grow and spread. I hope we will occupy every facet of society - in our workplace, our government, and our homes. I hope we will fundamentally transform the way we organize as a society and ultimately the way we relate to each other as human beings.

I will kindly wait for you to unroll your eyes.

Of course, the predictable reaction is to dismiss me outright as an arrogant naïf. But in reality, it is the resignation to the status quo, to the permanent, immovable, everlasting present-day system, that is the height of naivety. To think what we have here is the logical conclusion of societal organization is the height of arrogance. Rest assured, you'd be in plentiful company throughout history, undoubtedly the monarchs, feudal lords, and many of their servants felt the same way about their conditions. But change and evolution is all we have ever known and all we will ever know. And revolution is the only societal constant.

Revolt is fluid. And acts of revolution can exist in infinite graduations. On the most modest end we find simply declaring to oneself that they find the current state intolerable and everything spills out naturally from there. There are also infinite graduation in terms of meaning in acts of revolts. On the more modest end of this spectrum we might find something like jaywalking, undeniably an act of revolt, but not a particularly meaningful one.

The difficulty comes in trying to reconcile which acts of revolt spill into the most meaningful influence. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists have all tried to determine the conditions for revolution, but it always struck me as such a fruitless endeavor. There's simply too many variables and it's often logistically impossible to draw a causal chain of reactions.

So here is where the Occupy movement really inspires me, and truly makes me hopeful. It seems apparent to me that we're on the cusp of a new international age of revolt against the failures of representative democracy (or at least these familiar parliamentary forms of representative democracy). At least this is how I'm interpreting the general sentiment of people I've talked with who insist their grievance is more systemic than policy. Even if they can't articulate it exactly, they know they want something more reflective of the masses, the rhetorical 99%. This is wholly unfamiliar territory as to how we to combat such a system and consciously move toward a more directly democratic, more decentralized form approaching self-governance. What Occupy offers, though, is a seemingly unlimited resource for acts of revolt. Every day offers a new tactic (people are starting to occupy foreclosed homes), a new direct action (shutting down the Port of Oakland had a larger tangible immediate impact than the Boston Tea Party), a new economic push back (student debt pledge of refusal), and a constantly evolving horizontal process.

So apologies, but I don't really give a damn about people whose criticism amounts to sniping from the sidelines at us being "unfocused" or "utopian" or "too radical" or "not radical enough." Because at long last someone's actually trying something, anything, in this country. And the more acts of revolt we do and longer we last, the better chance one of these acts of revolt will ripple into something even more meaningful. This is all I hope for, and indeed all I can hope for.