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December 22, 2011
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Occupy Your Heart
[ Holiday Note for TomDispatch Readers: Call it a tradition by now. Rebecca Solnit has had the last word at this website for years, looking forward, looking back, and in 2010, before our year of protest even began, considering “alternatives” to what is. This year, those alternatives have been manifesting themselves everywhere and so she considers the moment we’re in. With her latest post, we at TomDispatch proudly end 2011, but we’ll be back the first week of 2012 with more unexpected thoughts, reports on subjects others ignore, and surprises of all sorts. In the meantime, thanks go to the stalwart crew that keeps TD going: Associate Editor Nick Turse, who will return in 2012 with more of his changing-face-of-empire series; Associate Editor Andy Kroll, who will again be on the economic beat for us; Timothy MacBain, gearing up for another fantastic year of TD audio interviews; Joe Duax and Dimitri Siavelis making sure that the site is always shipshape and ready to roll; Christopher Holmes, whose eagle eye keeps error in our dispatches to a miraculous minimum; and Erica Eichelberger, who will be expanding TD social networking in the new year. I thank them all. With them around, life couldn’t be better. Last but hardly least, thanks to all of you who read this site, write in with thoughts, encouragement, and criticism, contribute the $$$ that help keep us going, pass TD material on to others, and generally spread the word. What more could we ask? Have a good holiday. (Final, completely subliminal message: buy a copy of my new book, The United States of Fear, before the year ends.) See you in 2012! Tom] The other evening, I took the subway to the very bottom of Broadway, reputedly the longest street in the world, for a rally of New York’s transit workers. Their contract expires in mid-January and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is reportedly calling on them for draconian givebacks the next time around. It’s a tough moment for unions in negotiations everywhere. (Only executives never seem to be asked to give back anything of significance.) Still, it was a vigorous rally of perhaps 500 members of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union, other supporters, and some Occupy Wall Street types. A string of union officials and local politicians addressed the crowd, penned in as usual by the police, before a representative of the Occupy movement, a young Verizon worker, rose to speak energetically about direct democracy and the union movement to shouts, cheers, and the shrill treble of whistles blown by the assembled transit workers who had offered early support to Occupy Wall Street. That a labor rally even wanted the imprimatur of the Occupy movement was evidence that our world is in the process of rapid change, but what came next was more striking. As the last speaker put down the mic, the crowd, whistles blowing, signs bobbing, headed for Zuccotti Park, the former campground of the OWS movement, where, having filed into the now fenced in, well guarded “park”-cum-prison, they conducted another, more spontaneous rally. And this was just one night in New York. Four months ago, when it came to rallies, protests, demonstrations, in any given week next to nothing was happening. Today, in my hometown, you would have to devote your life to nothing else simply to keep up with what’s going on just about every day. And New York is hardly unique. Something has distinctly come to life across the country, around the world. In mid-December, Muscovites took to the streets of the Russian capital, and now in southern China, thousands of villagers have been occupying their own village in the face of police and troops to protest a land grab by local officials. Those villagers may or may not have heard of Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring or the European summer, but face it, something is in the air and it’s spreading. It’s the zeitgeist of this moment. If you want to avoid it, try the moon. Chinese villagers can feel it, and so can rattled Chinese officials, who gave in to key demands of those angry villagers. So, too, has TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Long before the rest of us, she sensed that something was indeed coming and, in that spirit, has been the voice of hope at this website. Now, she ends TomDispatch’s 2011 by considering what may be arising on this disaster planet. Tom
Compassion Is Our New Currency
Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds
By Rebecca Solnit
Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.
The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”
The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a signthat says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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