The Road To "Getting" The Occupation

Nov 11th, 2011
by F. Grey Parker

"At first..."

If you are paying attention to the established punditry and their evolving attitudes regarding the Occupy movement at all, those are words you have probably read in one form or another by now.

I started out, like most voices on the left, asking "where are the demands?"

At first, I simply couldn't view this outbreak of civil disobedience through any prism other than the traditional 'issue-action,' 'party-politic' or 'platform-plank' approach which has, let me be honest, defined my activism for a quarter of a century. It just didn't compute...

at first...

My entire adult life had been dedicated, in one way or another, to slamming the inequities of the system while simultaneously playing by their rules.

Then, a funny thing happened; I got it.

A few weeks later, I found myself sleeping in Liberty Square. This was not a small decision. I have a woman who loves me, a comfortable (albeit modest) home and a routine.

When you tell the person who loves you, "hey, honey, I am gonna' go sleep in a park in New York City where people are being injured and arrested by thugs and it looks like the revolution..." let's just say it doesn't necessarily go over very well.

The real problem I had was not Jenni's serious reservations; It was that I felt I didn't have a choice.

I believe in this thing.

Whatever part I could play, particularly in exposing the truth on the ground in the face of big media's spin, was the most important thing I could do. It still is.

This journey from on-the-fence naysayer to outright advocate is becoming increasingly common. I have heard it from colleagues. I have read it in the writings of others.

I was very pleased to have read that Matt Taibbi just got it, too:

"I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street." EMPHASIS OURS

Welcome to the club:

"Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left."

Please read his whole piece HERE.

The real point is that almost everyone should "get it." At least, everyone who is not a slave or a tool should "get it." As J Smooth, who was also "skeptical" a short time ago, put it so well, "As it keeps growing and coalescing, if certain people keep on professing not to get it, those were probably the people who weren't supposed to get it."

A few weeks ago, I posed the question outright, "You still don't get it?"

Well... if you don't by now, I think perhaps J was right. You were never supposed to.