Eugene Robinson: Occupy the Moment

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/occupy_the_moment_20111010/

Occupy the Moment
Posted on Oct 10, 2011


David Shankbone (CC-BY)

By Eugene Robinson



Occupy Wall Street and its kindred protests around the country are inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic. God, I love them.

I love every little thing about these gloriously amateurish sit-ins. I love that they are spontaneous, leaderless and open-ended. I love that the protesters refuse to issue specific demands beyond a forceful call for economic justice. I also love that in Chicago—uniquely, thus far—demonstrators have ignored the rule about vagueness and are being ultra-specific about their goals. I love that there are no rules, just tendencies.

I love that when Occupy Wall Street was denied permission to use bullhorns, demonstrators came up with an alternative straight out of Monty Python, or maybe “The Flintstones”: Have everyone within earshot repeat a speaker’s words, verbatim and in unison, so the whole crowd can hear. It works—and sounds tremendously silly. Protest movements that grow into something important tend to have a sense of humor.

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We have no shortage of politicians in this country. What we need is more passion and energy in the service of justice. We need to be forced to answer questions that sound simplistic or naive—questions about ethics and values. Detailed policy positions can wait.

At some point, these protest encampments will disappear—and, since the nation and the world will not have changed, they’ll be judged a failure. But I’ve got a hunch that this likely judgment will be wrong. I think the seed of progressive activism in the Occupy protests may grow into something very big indeed.