Forum Post: Occupy Post-mortem

Occupy Post-mortem

Is it too soon to think in terms of a post-mortem for the Occupy movement? Yes and No as is usually the case.

What an incredible phenomena it was (and is?). Talk about striking a chord and have the chorus sing ‘Alleluia’.

My first view of the movement was the amazing shot of the original protestors marching past Wall Street and having the camera pan up to the balconies across the front of the stock exchange and seeing the brokers literally with champagne classes upraised as they looked down. The announcer’s comment was ‘Now there’s a Marie Antoinette moment if ever I saw one’. I wrote a little introductory piece in which I edited out my comments about the guillotine as being too inflammatory for my mediator sensibilities. The next morning the Globe and Mail editorial cartoon had a guillotine front and centre.

Then the brilliant slogan ‘We are the 99%’. How many of us can identify with that? CEO’s with massive bonuses whist laying off the staff. Public money bailouts to staggering banks whilst they reward their top management for what? The wage gap that used to be 20:1 from the top to the bottom expanding to more than 400:1. Gee I can get mad about that. Initially the mainstream press dismissed the movement as the irrelevant griping of the have-nots: thus it has ever been. Then all of a sudden 1500+ cities across the world occupied their centres in sympathy. What is happening here Mr Jones? The Arab Spring wasn’t meant to infect the West!

So many new issues brought to front and centre. So many new debates that were being brushed under various carpets. Yes we are mad. Thank you Adbusters.

Here we are at the peak of peak everything getting ready to slide down the other side and knowing that all the systems that are in place for the trip up here are irrelevant to the world on the other side. Change is so rapid that anyone who locks into anything for more than a moment will be a dinosaur by tomorrow.

I loved the consensus circle decision making process in the Occupy movement. Not perhaps the central power model of China or even the ‘democratic ‘ process of the West. It was slow and painful to watch. Two hours to decide on some simple decisions that a dictator would have resolved in a minute. Then that fabulous use of repetition to carry the voices out into the crowds. This was not a rabble. These were very focused and intelligent people reaching into the void to find out where we are going.

Well we know that so much of our current house of cards is not going to survive much longer and so we need new models that we can design into place rather than just collapse into mayhem.

How can we still be using GDP as any kind of indicator when we know that the BP oil spill in the Gulf increased GDP?

How can we bail out the banks that brought us the sub prime housing crisis with their ‘clever’ use of derivatives to enrich only themselves?

How can we give subsidies to the fossil fuel industry when we know that we have to limit the carbon output or condemn future generations to a vastly different planet?

How can we allow such huge disparities of wealth when we know it will lead to disaster?

So thank you ‘Occupy Wall Street’ for drawing our attention to these matters that sorely need our attention.