What Not To Ask the Occupiers

What Not To Ask the Occupiers

Tim Butterworth: What Not To Ask the Occupiers

I’ve spent some time at Occupy DC on McPherson Square and some with the counterpart ?October 2011?Stop the Machine! Create a New World!? group on Freedom Plaza. I know McPherson Square better and find it alternately inspiring and frustrating. The energy required to keep a sustainable civil society going almost overwhelms any effective action that could be accomplished, and the refusal to develop a hierarchical leadership means decisions take hours or days or never happen.

The camps have to deal with all the ills of the real world. They are magnets for the homeless and street people, many with emotional problems or addictions. Add to that sanitation, food, shelter?it?s no vacation for the people trying to keep the occupations going. But there is amazing support from the community. Some nearby coffee shops have had an open-door policy for those seeking wi-fi connections, shelter from the cold, and bathrooms. The AFL and SEIU provide showers in their local headquarters. And there are random gifts. A man in a suit and tie walks up with a dozen pizzas one afternoon. An Ethiopian restaurant group pulls up in a van and tells the kitchen crew to take the afternoon off: ?We?ll cater this evening.? A farmer drives up with a truckload of straw bales: ?It?s going to be cold tonight. Fluff this up, tuck it around your sleeping bags, and it will keep you warm.?

I took a couple of volunteers to Key Bridge to hear Obama tout his infrastructure program. We carried three big signs: ?AVERAGE DAY?S PAY = $127,? ?AVERAGE FORBE?S 500 DAILY PAY = $50,000,? and ?99 %.? Almost everyone in the crowd behind the barriers gave us a thumbs-up or made positive comments. There were lots of photographers, and an interviewer with a German TV program. Only one person objected, a surgeon who was trying to start his own business. ?I know that salary is excessive,? he said, ?but what do you want to do about it??

This is the standard complaint about the Occupy movements: they don’t offer any solutions. Occupiers are, instead, speaking truth to power. They are doing it well, doing it day after day, and are teaching the media how to do it, too. Asking occupiers to provide solutions to our problems is a bizarre request. We have a president, a vice president, fifteen cabinet members, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, a council of economic advisors, 535 legislators with thousands of researchers and aides, and a $3.7 trillion budget. It?s their job to fix the problems. It’s a discouraging sign about the state of America if people expect these dedicated protesters?many of them young, swamped with college debt, unemployed, or marginalized?to know how to fix the mess that Wall Street and the government have made over the years. The occupiers? tent cities, at least until they?re broken up, embody the consequences of government policies day after day, so none of us can forget how badly our government has failed us.