A Eulogy for #Occupy | Wired Opinion | Wired.com: We were trapped in endless war and financial crisis, in debt and downward spiral that our leaders bickered about, but did nothing to stop. It wore away at people with the implacability of geological erosion. The American empire we never wanted in the first place was crumbling slowly, and nothing we did in our lives seemed to matter. We had learned in the past 10 years that we couldn’t change our fates, not with hard work, taking on debt, education, or even trying to live healthy. Even when we wanted to, we could not stop wars, rein in banks, repair our crumbling infrastructure or take care of each other. We couldn’t control medical costs or the price of an education. Gas was going up, temperatures were going up.
Americans themselves lived quiet lives of untold loneliness, socially isolated. But, as we’d come to learn, we’re always watched by our infrastructure’s silent machines. Lonely, but never alone. It had become an authoritarian failing state, but without the authority, or even the sense of change that comes with total failure. We were dying by bits and pieces, going numb and fading away.
It was as if so many of us, myself included, were looking at the protestors and saying, “Please, let something matter again.”
We took blows and kicks from riot police and SWAT rather than step on the people behind us that had slipped in the mud. We had relearned in each argument and every pitched tent that the fundamental job of humans is to care for one another, to keep each other whole and safe.
It was this drive which linked arms and quietly waited for violence in front of a thousand TV cameras the world over — this, and nothing more.
There was no real cynical distance in this movement. It was the opposite of politics that way; it was dirty and smelly and dark, and if you scratch past the patina of personal cynicism, every heart was made of crazy-glued porcelain. Every body was made of scars.
No one walked away from Occupy the same person. The occupiers will always say “we learned so much,” and the simplicity of the words belie how deep the change runs. We all learned so much in the season of Occupy. We learned there is a hostile army threaded through our nation. We learned that children can be casually brutalized, just to keep traffic from being inconvenienced.
We learned that Americans can come together and care for one another. We learned there is a great and terrible spirit in this land, the sleeping giant of our spirits summed together.