The Zero Sum Movement

The first time I walked into the Occupy Oakland encampment, I felt like I had set foot in utopia.  I had been to Oscar Grant Plaza, in front of city hall, just a few days prior, but left the occupation’s first general assembly quickly after it devolved into an endless series of ideological pontifications: this isn’t going anywhere, I thought.  But it did.  When I returned, Occupy Oakland was a veritable city, except that most cities don’t provide their own power via bicycle generators, don’t provide free food and medical care for anyone who needs it, and aren’t bursting with beautiful artwork and transformative ideas in equal measure.

Over the next month, I returned to Oakland repeatedly—to march in the occupation’s first demonstration, to help them retake the plaza after the first time they were evicted, to aid in shutting down Oakland’s port as part of a general strike, and, once, to show it off to some visiting friends.  It’s funny, because media reports always emphasize how angry occupiers are, and in public, there’s some truth to that.  Yet behind that there was always a palpable sense of joy and possibility.  Every time I left Oakland, I felt rejuvenated and inspired.  If we can create an egalitarian, democratic enclave in the heart of Oakland, with all its racial conflict, violence, homelessness, and deprivation, then how could we possibly deny the possibility of organizing our entire society around these principles?

Somehow, over that same month, Occupy Oakland came to symbolize something very different to the rest of the nation.  Reports of a shooting outside the encampment (no rareity in the 5^th most dangerous city in the U.S.) and images of protesters rioting in downtown (actually, they were trying to set up a library in an abandoned building until they were attacked by police, but whatever) came to define the occupation.  The city did its part by deliberately attempting to make the park an unsafe and unclean space.  Eventually, the encampment became not just physically but semiotically contaminated, the manifestation of all the concerns about violence and hedonism that even erstwhile sympathzers had about the occupy movement.  I knew it was bad when my mother told me, just don’t go to Occupy Oakland.

But when, three weeks ago, the call went out to support the encampment against a possible eviction, I felt that I needed to go: Occupy Oakland had given me so much that the least I could do was support their very existence.  We arrived at about 2 a.m., and parked a few blocks away from the plaza, where a line of ambulences were waiting.  I asked one of the paramedics if he had any advice for staying safe: he responded that I should go as far away as possible.  I asked him if he thought anyone was going to die tonight: he said he wasn’t sure.  “That encampment’s a shithole, man.  It’s got to go”, he explained.

I have to admit that when I reached the plaza, I could see what he meant.  Some combination of rain, negative publicity, and news of the impending eviction meant that the camp had fallen into disrepair.  Most of the tents were deserted, save a few strung-out looking individuals, and there was trash everywhere.  In contrast to a few weeks earlier, when thousands had thronged to the street to defend the encampment, this time only a scant few responded.  Those that weren’t frantically packing up their belongings were standing in a nearby intersection, half-heartedly participating in an all-night dance party that had been labeled, appropriately, the “Occupocalypse.”

Few in my generation will experience warfare in the way our grandparents did, even if the response to occupations around the country has turned our inner cities into veritable battlefields.  Tenuous though the military analogy is, I nonetheless bet that night was the closest I will ever come to experiencing what it is like to be in a city right before the arrival of an enemy army.  Anonymous Medics wearing all-black spandex suits and Guy Fawkes-masks came in with reports of police encircling us from all directions, but the information was never put to use.  Rumors swirled, and the mechanisms of decision-making that have defined our movement—the people’s mic and consensus—broke down.  A few black bloc anarchists donned vinegar-soaked bandanas, in preparation for a street fight.  Some local union members marched in a picket line, chanting lines of strength and empowerment that, for the moment, seemed to have lost their meaning.  Confusion, panic, and above all, despair permeated the crowd.

When the police came, the hopelessness of the situation was immediately evident.  There were hundreds of them, coming from all sides, armed with batons, rubber bullets, and assault rifles.  We didn’t come to an open decision, but everyone at this point realized we were there to bear witness, not to resist.  My best-case scenario rapidly shifted: just let no one get hurt.  I left when I could see that it would not be a massacre, and that most of those who were arrested would be given the chance to do so peacefully.  There’s no such thing as “non-violence” when hundreds of police are involved, but I was grateful not to see a repeat of the bloody mess they caused a few weeks prior.

I’m uncomfortable with some of the comparisons between police repression in the U.S. and the Middle East; although the linkages in police tactics and weaponry are important to note, we should not forget our fortune that Americans are not actually being killed yet.  But as I saw that night, you don’t need to harm our bodies to kill our sense of hope and possibility.  Occupy Oakland has not disappeared—indeed, tomorrow they will most likely manage to shut down the port of Oakland, once again, in solidarity with ILWU workers struggling for their right to be unionized.  They will find ways to keep fighting, as will the evicted occupiers in LA, Boston, New York, and Portland.

But without our encampments—our sites of radical, almost playful experimentation in utopia—I fear our movement has lost its innocence.  We spent two months pretending to live in the world we sought to create; now we have no choice but to confront the ugly reality of the world we live in.  They did not let us make our own power: now we must take it.  They refused to let us occupy public space: so we will seize their private buildings.  There can be no denying that this struggle is now zero sum.  But they were the ones who made it that way.

Apathetic Apologetic

A few Mondays ago, I saw my future.  No, not a vision of being arrested and thrown in jail—this was a more long-term vision.  It was a premonition of my future as a college professor: standing in the front of a lecture hall filled with bored-looking undergraduates, their tired faces half hidden by laptops (open to facebook, I’m sure—it wasn’t that long ago that I was an undergrad, after all).

It seems fitting that my first experience teaching undergraduates was a lesson in activism, not sociology.  As part of our mobilization for Wednesday’s peaceful civil disobedience violent police riots, the union organized classroom presentations to educate the campus body about the extent of the impending cuts to public education.  When an e-mail went over our listserve asking for someone to present to a 250 person Introduction to Sociology lecture, another graduate student and I stepped forward, thinking that with ten minutes crammed full of ghastly statistics and compelling arguments, we could turn out a veritable horde for our upcoming rally.

The professor warned us that his students were “greener than green”, nearly all of them freshmen and almost none of them well-informed about the intricacies of neo-liberal retrenchment of government services.  This in mind, though, I thought we had a pretty good schtick: I roped them in by quizzing them about what tuition was five years ago (no one came even close to guessing that it was less than half its current amount) and comparing it to what it would be in five years under the regent’s proposal (double the current figure).  My friend then wove these numbers into a broader narrative of how they, as students, were being asked to pay for a crisis caused by the misdeeds of others.  I closed with a rousing description of the effectiveness of public protest, ranging from Tahrir Square to Berkeley’s own demonstrations in the 1960s.  “Who’s with us?” my friend asked.

You could practically hear crickets chirping at the end.

As a general rule, apathy makes me angry.  I’m hardwired to think that injustice demands a response, so I struggle to empathize with those who will not stand up for others (or even themselves).  Yes, I know enough sociology to understand that most people face deep, structural barriers to political action.  But over the past week, riding through Berkeley on my way to events in Oakland, I cannot help to think that at least some of these people going about their business have the time and resources to stand up for what is right.  After all, as scores of us were being beaten on November 9^th, hundreds of our peers were walking by on their way to the library or Wednesday night frat parties.  I don’t expect them to pull the cops off of us, but it is almost impossible for me to forgive a mentality that leads someone to just walk by without even stopping to inquire about what is going on.  There is only so much indifference that sociology can excuse

Yet, even given the events of the last few weeks, I still couldn’t be angry at these kids.  I wonder how I would have responded had, ten weeks into Princeton, someone come to my class and told me that, despite having worked for years just to get to college, I would now have to fight tooth-and-nail to get any education at all.  Added on to the stresses of adjusting to college and coping with my academic work, would I really have heeded the call?  I’ve heard so many times from people who don’t want to protest, “I’m just here to get an education.”  As if I’m not.  The last few days, I’ve thought over and over again how I’d really rather just read Marx and Durkheim, just be a student, have time for reflection and cooking and drinking and soaking up the bliss of my mid-twenties.  I get it.

But this is not the world we live in.  We are at a historical juncture in which we must take sides.  Eventually, those wide-eyed undergraduates will learn that.  They’ll find out that, in America’s second gilded age, they will have to fight for everything—for public education, for a decent job, for health care and a pension, for access to the criminal justice system.  Or perhaps they can ignore it, buy into the American dream, and get screwed anyway.  But it seems cruel to tell them now.  Jesus, they’re just kids, and the world is a scary place.

Gentle / Strong

I didn’t really sleep the first few nights after my arrest.  Exhausted as I was by a night spent in jail—coming on the heels of several nights where academic work and organizing meetings had kept me up late—I felt a profound sense of disquiet, and returned to that most familiar and comforting of behaiors for any graduate student: reading.  Indeed, with so many extra hours spent not-sleeping, I was finally able to crack open that book of non-sociology on my bedstand, Cry, the Beloved Country.  And what did I find, but this passage:

 “I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.  I shall do this…because I cannot find it in me to do anything else.  I am lost when I balance this against that, I am lost when I ask if this is safe, I am lost when I ask if men, white men or black men, Englishmen or Afrikaners, Gentiles or Jews, will approve.  Therefore I shall try to do what is right, and to speak what is true.

I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul.  I do it because I am no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself, and to deny it with another.  I do not wish to live like that, I would rather die than live like that.  I understand better those who have died for their convictions, and have not thought it was wonderful or brave or noble to die.  They died rather than live, that was all.”

When I started writing this post, the ambivalent, resigned martyrdom of the above quote seemed to capture exactly how I felt about my own activism after watching two weeks of violent repression of the Occupy movement and contemplating my own part in it.  But then, on further reflection, it doesn’t, and neither do any of the other boxes into which I have tried to fit my political life post-November 9^th—a question which, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, is still weighing heavily on my mind.  After all, can I really say that getting beat up makes me a hero—as many kind posters on this blog have suggeste?  And can I even call myself a victim when an extraordinary trauma for me is no more than routine for many people of color?

My initial impulse after the 9^th was to withdraw: to take some time to sit in my office, read sociology, clear my mind, and heal.  Yet even when I stayed physically away from the ongoing protests on campus and across the country, I couldn’t avoid them, compulsively checking the news and twitter.  Even when I shut myself off electronically, I couldn’t stop obsessing about the violence being visited on the occupy movement.  So I came up with an alternative strategy: to “put all my chips on the table” in a single-minded pursuit of seeing the wrongs committed on the 9^th righted.  I was going to thrown down all the social and financial resources of a rich white kid who went to Princeton towards the all-consuming quest to see Chancellor Birgeneau resign and a few riot cops join the ranks of the unemployed.  If a narrow focus on a single issue was what it took to achieve justice, so be it.

But justice for whom, exactly?  I am a child of liberal universalism, and have always subscribed to the idea that an injustice to one is supposed to be an injustice to all.  Indeed, before this month I would probably have noted with pride that every cause I have ever been involved with has been against injustice committed against others.  I have mobilized for immigrants without fear of deportation, spoken for public education knowing I will not pay higher tuition, and protested for animal rights with certainty I will not be eaten.  The result is a sort of detachment that has given me space to reflect on my activism, but also to distance myself from it, putting politics in a segmented space that I could leave behind when I left a protest and return to at my leisure.

Perhaps that is a good model for activism, but for me, it is no longer a tenable one.  As I have discovered, the truth is that an injustice to me is a lot different than an injustice to you.  Try as I might to put what has happened in context, trauma to my body and my soul has had a qualitatively different impact on me that no awareness of external suffering can quite equal.  I have often lamented the inability of activists with whom I have worked to reach pragmatic compromises and frame their concerns about injustice in broadly appealing ways, yet now I fully understand.  Rationality and detachment in a world full of wrongs—the ability to lead a balanced life while aware of how fucked-up things are—is its own form of privilege.

The other day, I saw the cop who on November 9^th beat me and later told me I had no rights.  She was standing outside Occupy Cal, casually chatting with a few other officers and keeping an eye on our newly reconstituted encampment.  I walked up to her and asked her if she could look me in the eye and tell me that I deserved to have my ribs broken.  She looked past me, not abashedly but indifferently, and told me that she had never broken anyone’s ribs.  I don’t know what response I was expecting, but I had certainly hoped for a glimmer of empathy (if not contrition).  I broke into tears as I walked away.  Suddenly the most inflammatory rhetoric of our movement—that cops are inhuman pigs, that their violence against us justifies violence in response, and that those that do not join in our denuciations are complicit in their injustice—made sense to me.

And that is why I have to admit that, although my heart wanted to be with my brothers and sisters in Cal and Davis this last week, I am grateful for the enforced separation from the movement that 3,000 miles of distance has brought me.  We activists must walk a delicate line, filling ourselves with rage at the system while not hating those within it, dedicating ourselves to justice while not being consumed by injustice, and believing in the inherent goodness of humanity in the face of at times overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  We must, in the words of a wise comrade, be both gentle and strong.

I thought I had largely struck that balance, but now that this has become personal, I am no longer so sure.  As Alan Paton writes of apartheid South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country:

“I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

In Between Protests, I Also Do Some Sociology

At long last, my first peer-reviewed academic publication is available online in the journal Ethnography, at least to those with access to an academic database.

I wrote this as my Junior Paper at Princeton, and I have to confess that my thinking on some of these issues has evolved and matured a bit.  Still, given the theme of this article – the meaning and power of dramatic, unconventional, non-institutional protest – now seems like a rather appropriate time to see it published.

Arrested

Yesterday, I was beaten, arrested, and jailed for participating in an act of civil disobedience against the privatization of education and criminalization of dissent in California.

I’ve spent the last day trying to process what happened, and writing this is an attempt to get it out of my mind and on to paper (having spent last night on a cement floor, I could use some mental solace).  There’s nothing exceptional about my experience, and yet, even knowing that, I write this grappling with a feeling of voicelessness and powerlessness that I have never before experienced.  I know that, once you start talking about “police brutality” and “police states”, you enter into a group of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists that most Americans dismiss out of hand.  I can’t control that portrayal, but for whatever reason, I need to talk about what happened, even if I can’t figure out why it has affected me so much.

We set up “Occupy Cal” in an attempt to open up our university to groups that had been excluded from it, to create a safe space to debate and discuss the future of public education, and to exercise our first amendment right to free assembly. We all knew that what we were doing was in violation of university policy—which views encampments as, somehow, on par with graffiti and building occupations insofar as they disrupt classes and harm university property—and that in doing so we risked arrest.  But, having passed a resolution explicitly declaring our encampment peaceful and non-violent, we expected those arrests to follow the rules of engagement that have defined civil disobedience since the Civil Rights era.  Cal has had occupations before – protesting against apartheid, for example – and while the university didn’t like them, it ultimately tolerated them as a means of democratic dissent.

We were wrong to think the same would happen for us.  Our encampment was torn down at 4:00 p.m., but we set up again.  At 9:30 p.m., the police issued an order to disperse.  We stayed, linking arms and chanting “Peaceful protest!”  The police advanced up to the crowd and started stabbing and beating people with batons.  Most of them were riot cops from other jurisdictions; a professor who has been here thirty years assures me that this level of militarization of police (there were officers with shotguns and rubber-bullet guns) is unprecedented.  Although the labels “violent” and “non-violent” get bandied around to the extent that they have virtually lost any meaning in public discourse, I have never seen protesters remain so defiantly peaceful in the face of such brutality.  Reasonable people can disagree about whether privatizing Cal is a good thing; no one should disagree that what this video shows is unconscionable.  I trust you to make your own decisions about who here was “violent” and who was not.

I was in front, near the side of the encampment.  A female officer walked up to me and started stabbing me in the ribs with her baton as I screamed at her that I was peaceful and not resisting her in any way.  She ordered me to back up.  This was impossible since there were lines of people behind me, and, perceiving me as refusing to comply with her orders, she continued stabbing me.  I buckled over, letting go of the people around me, because at this point I realized that only by being arrested would the beating stop.  I threw my hands up into peace signs and shouted that I wanted to be arrested non-violently.  I was not afforded that option.  I was dragged through the officers despite my attempts to comply with the officers out of my own volition.  I put my hands behind my back, but they threw me to the ground anyway.  I turned to ask what the charges were and an officer punched me back to the ground.  (If you think I’m pulling this out of my ass, watch this video at 1:40)

They cuffed me and dragged me into Sproul Hall, where they were holding around thirty of us.  An officer came and asked me my name, and I told it to her.  She then started firing off questions, and I politely told her that before I did that, I wanted to know my rights at this point in the process and when I would be able to speak to a lawyer.  She responded, “You have no rights”, to which I responded “That’s impossible.”  In one of many disturbing moments of the night, she informed me that I was wrong – and wrote me down as a non-cooperative arrestee.   That simple request will earn me extra harsh treatment in the student disciplinary process, she assured me.  Throughout the night, we were referred to as “bodies” not “people.”  I was never Mirandized.

In a sense, at this point, the worst was over.  The thirty of us supported one another, comforted one another, and inspired one another.  We were driven to a county jail in Oakland, where they booked us—threatening that because our crimes were “violent” we could not be released until an Arraignment on Monday.  In a holding cell that reeked of urine, we swapped stories, sang songs ranging from Buffalo Springfield to the Backstreet Boys, and shared a sense of camaraderie that could never be imagined in another setting.  If we were afraid, we weren’t showing it: indeed, I would love to have had the defiant moral clarity of some of my eighteen-year-old comrades.

In the end, the entire process was a sham.  I called my parents collect at 3 a.m. ($4.85 a minute—just to screw the poor a little bit more) telling them they needed to put together $20,000 in bail.  And then, right afterward, a kind officer told me that they were sure that our charges of “resisting arrest” and “participating in a riot” had no chance in court, and so they were going to cite and release us.  They took their sweet time in getting us out, but when we were again free, some of our union brothers and sisters were waiting for us with food, hugs, and their own first arrest stories.  It’s strange to have experienced such wild oscillation between human decency and human cruelty, to interact both with officers who were thoughtful and considerate and those who were mindlessly violent.

On the grand spectrum of police encounters, I’ve gotten off easy.  My injuries are confined to a cracked rib and bruised psyche.  I am an enormously privileged person in that I can get arrested and know that it will not ruin my life or manifestly affect my academic career.  I have received solidarity and comfort from friends all over the country and professors in the department I barely know.  I have not for one moment doubted that my actions were in the right, and that I have nothing to be ashamed of; this is a source of strength that holds me together.  And yet I have spent all day on the verge of crying.

I feel profoundly disempowered by what happened yesterday, in a way that has only become apparent once I left the solidarity of my fellow arrestees.  I feel violated because I no longer am safe in my own body, knowing that I can be stabbed and manhandled and the individuals responsible will face no consequences.  I feel humiliated because some of the people I have talked to seem to think that what happened last night demands no response, which suggests the worthlessness of my suffering and my cause.  I feel small because I see myself arrayed against the implacable forces of an administration bent on spinning my actions into the framework of violent, radicals seeking to disrupt life for good, law-abiding students.  I feel stupid because many of the illusions I grew up with about the rules of engagement in our political system are crumbling before me, leaving me no avenue through which to channel my anger about what has happened to me.

- – - – -

I’d rather end on a practical note.  I hope anyone reading this will consider writing Chancellor Birgeneau, who ordered the attacks, to tell him that you—as a citizen of Berkeley / California / Earth—do not approve.  We always chant “The whole world is watching” when police start attacking us.  It’d be nice to know that it’s true.

I Smashed A Bank, And I Didn’t Like It

Let me start this blog post by saying that if I had done something actually illegal—well, more specifically, something for which I feared prosecution—I would not be posting it on this blog.  Sorry to disappoint.  This will make for my third activism-related post in a row, though.  For those looking for different content, I suggest you take to the streets and help overthrow our current political order, so I can get back to posting pithy observations about graduate school.

On Saturday, I attended Occupy Oakland’s first “official” event, a protest march through downtown Oakland.  Here’s the opening to the blog post that I really, really wanted to write about it:

 Question: What do you get when a grab-bag of anarchists furious at the state of society calls for an unpermitted protest march with no prior communication with the police, clearly defined aims, or leadership responsible for the course of events?

Answer: A pleasant walk through Downtown Oakland in the sunshine.

It would have been the perfect segue for a discussion about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has been grossly misrepresented, how policing causes disruption rather than prevents it, and, indeed, how our assumptions about humanity’s intrinsic irresponsibility and lack of empathy should be challenged.

And, for a while, Saturday’s event seemed to be feeding into my erstwhile narrative.  The crowd—like Occupy Oakland itself—was immensely diverse.  There were heavily tattooed crust punks in ripped “Leftover Crack” t-shirts, parents leading children with signs featuring egalitarian slogans drawn from Dr. Seuss, a smattering of Oakland’s homeless population, and a few old bearded hippies hoping that, if they squinted hard enough, they’d see 1968.  There was even a marching band, a soundtrack for a roving street party overflowing with positive energy and community spirit.

At least, until we saw a local branch of Chase Bank.  I read an American Journal of Sociology article today that showed how moments of transgressive collective action can be modeled using the same models of sudden, dramatic expansion as wildfires and landslides, and Saturday showed the theory’s validity in practice.  Someone suggested we go inside; all of the sudden, the doors were held open and people started streaming in.  At first, we were just chanting: “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”  The few customers who were there fled quickly; the employees just looked confused.  The girl next to me was scribbling “Occupy” on all the bank slips in the line up to the tellers’ windows.  A few seconds later, it was raining bank slips all around.  I heard glass break, and looked over to see that a vase had been knocked off the welcome

We left as quickly as we entered, leaving a big mess but having caused little damage.  Everyone was out before the cops came.  In the sins of the world, it was a small one, and in part I’m writing this blog post to acknowledge one of the petty grievances against the OWS movement—it causes mild direct and indirect costs and inconveniences—and to tell the world: get over it.  Nonetheless, the symbolic outcomes are disturbing.  By the time we reassembled outside, the entire tenor of the march had changed.  The parents and kids were leaving—it’s hard, after all, to explain to your kid why they have to respect the property of your preschool classmates but you can destroy it if it belongs to a bank.  If the media covered the event—and honestly, I’m too scared to look if they did—their reports will dwell exclusively on the two minutes of “violence”, not the three hours of collective effervescence.

We live in a profoundly disempowered society.  The result is that most of us are able to make decisions without considering their consequences, because we are convinced the things we value and demand will never be actualized.  To me, the perfect example of this is Ron Paul supporters: the only way you can possibly support him is by assuming that he’ll never be elected, thus sidestepping the question of what would actually happen if he were.  Our narrative of collective disempowerment stems even to our “leaders.”  Sarah Palin can put a target on a congresswoman’s head and then claim she has nothing to do with that congresswoman being shot, because—after all—she’s so heavily discriminated against by the lamestream media that she couldn’t possibly be responsible.

Occupy Wall Street flips this disempowerment on its head.  People don’t understand consensus-based decision-making because they see it as an ineffective way to get things done.  They miss that the point of consensus is to give us practice in making decisions that actually matter.  When a single person can block a collective proposal, they are all of the sudden confronted with the fact that their choices have an impact—not a familiar feeling for most of us, and one that requires a whole new pattern of thinking.  On the other hand, all the sudden, radical ideas—“Hey, let’s build an anarchist commune in front of City Hall”—are being put into practice.

And yet, we’re still not accustomed to the fact that, if we chant “burn the banks”, someone eventually actually will.  It’s kind of like Spider Man didn’t say: “with a little bit of power, you have to take at least a little bit of responsibility.”

 

On Efficacy

Tomorrow, we march.

I’ve been attending so many meetings, assemblies, flyer-ings, and marches in the last few weeks that it’s hard to see them as distinct events.  But still I tell myself that tomorrow is critical; that in a week that saw coordinated crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations across the country, it’s a crucial time to show solidarity and build momentum before the movement whithers away.  I’m so convinced (or perhaps, deluded) about how important tomorrow is that I’ve waived my don’t-be-a-moralizing-prick rule and sent an e-mail to my friends, encouraging them to join me.

Most of them won’t, and they’ll have good reasons not to.  If it’s not raining tomorrow, it’ll be too hot—either way, an unpleasant way to spend a Saturday.  They’ll have papers to write, funding applications to prepare, or, at the very least, hundreds of pages of reading to plough through.  Others will tell me, quite validly, that they really think the best way to achieve “change” is to focus on their degrees, trading short term engagement for long-term advancement, working towards that nebulous point in the future where we will, supposedly, forget about our careers and tenure and families and mortages and decide that now we’re ready to act.  The best reason not to come out, though, is encapsulated by a question that even I’ve been asking myself over and over again during the last few weeks: “You don’t actually think any of this will change anything, do you?”

Well no, not really.  I’m not stupid.  The odds are stacked against any movement for social justice, ever.  I can envision many scenarios in which Occupy Wall Street ends, and few of them are positive.  Eventually, images like that of a New York Police Supervisor beating the shit out of a woman will scare people off—or, if not that, the impending cold will.  Absent that, the grab bag of leftist causes that Occupy Wall Street represents might collapse from its own lack of coherence, dissolving into infighting as so many anarchist movements do.  Supposing the movement does piece together some demands, they will be dismissed immediately.  All told, the rational person would hedge his or her bets and stay home tomorrow.

I ultimately don’t buy the argument that people stay away not because they are apathetic, but because they’re saving their energy for things that are more likely to be effective.  After all, what would happen if we applied this same rationality to the rest of our lives—if we were as cautious about our day-to-day choices as we were about politics?  Why bother making a pass at the next girl at the bar when you know the chances you’ll wind up happily married to her are infinitesimal?  What’s the point of working hard to get ahead when the vast majority of Americans will die in the same socioeconomic cohort as their parents?  And why put on a seat belt given the tiny likelihood of this being the trip where you roll over?

The reality is that we are human precisely because we play long odds; our greatest moments are when we strive for things impossible.  Or maybe I should say improbable.  The funny thing is, things do change.  If you don’t believe me, try a Rawlsian thought experiment.  If you didn’t know what your race, class, or gender would be, would you rather be born in present day America—or the America of 100 years ago?  As catastrophic as things may seem today, I’ll bet you’d choose the America where people have an eight hour work day, a safety net of disability insurance and food stamps, and universal suffrage.  What’s makes that 100 year difference matter?  It was the aggregate of thousands of futile choices, the sum of meaningless individual flailings against an unjust system that, somehow and inexplicably, combined into something meaningful.

Some of our parents went to Washington to hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, joining a legion of Don Quixotes marching against centuries of entrenched hierarchy and subjugation.  Some of our parents watched it all on TV.  Have your pick, but if you stay at home, don’t expect me to keep you company.  I’ll be out tilting at windmills.