My heart was pushing me all week to go Occupy one place or another, especially Glens Falls, N.Y., and see what the protestors are about, but when the day came, I didn’t. I am very drawn to these protests, especially to the message that corporations are hurting people and damaging the very idea of work and life. People tell me every day that the point of their lives is to pay their bills, afford health care, build up their retirement funds. This, to me is not the point of life, but the absence of life and choice. A meaningful life, a life of self-determination, what I have always come to see as a self-determined life, is about freedom, choice and safety. About finding our light, and living our dreams. Almost noone I know believes they can afford to do that.
Corporations have degraded work, health care, and security. To me, they are simply too powerful, too big, too focused on profits and utterly disinterested in the consequences of what they do on human beings and human life, as well as Mother Earth. They have polluted the air, the ground, politics, creativity, media, medicine, the law and the right of individuals to be secure and cared for. If money is the only focal point of a culture, and if business is the only interest we protect, then we are barren and life becomes empty and frightening, as well as spiritually bereft. Any movement that calls attention to this draws my attention and my sympathy.
Yet I don’t want to occupy anyone else’s space. The police are not my enemy. I think a movement build on enemies is just trading one poison for another. I may not like Wall Street, but I do not believe they are evil, and if people wish to work there, that is their business, not mine. I do not blame them for any of my life or trouble. And I have no desire to be anywhere near their space. The leaders who practice peace and empathy are the ones who rock the world, at least in the history books that I read. I am responsible for my life, and I am not crafting yet another struggle story for myself, another way of seeing myself as someone else’s victim. One way to fight back is to withhold our money from the greediest and most callous corporations, something that will get their attention in a hurry, as happened with Bank Of America last week. Anybody who spends money in this society has power.
Activist Grace Lee Boggs, who is 96 and has spent her life working as a feminist and social activist, gave a piercing interview this week about the current protest movement, and I related to it. It isn’t enough, she said, simply to expose the enemy. The challenge is to reinvent society, and the meaning of life and opportunity and work and fulfillment. If we live simply to pay bills, afford health care, fatten up our retirement funds for a life of confinement and medical procedures then we are, to me, enslaving ourselves. Living only to pay your bills and your mortgage is not work, it is a new kind of enslavement. It is the corporate idea of work, creating things we are frightened into wanting, letting go of the life we really want.
The protestors seem to sense that our political system is out of control, moving away from our interests and into their own. Perhaps that is a good start. You begin with the protest, and then you move on to another stage.
Reinventing society is a simple thing to want, a difficult thing to do. I’m up for it, if such a movement or political leader emerges or if Occupy wants to move on to solutions and ideas. The very notion is pretty exciting.