This Occupy Wall Street/College Hill/Providence/Everywhere movement is big.
It is big in that it is the main large-scale challenge to the fundamental wackiness of our society. We all consequently have a pretty big decision to make when we choose whether or not we personally plan to participate. This is a massive question with huge implications for pretty much everything, and the only part of it that I am going to deal with right here is why Schoolhouse Rock lied to you.
"When I started," says Schoolhouse Rock's titular bill, "I wasn't even a bill. I was just an idea. Some folks back home decided they wanted a law passed, so they called their local Congressman and he said, ‘You're right, there oughta be a law.' Then he sat down and wrote me out and introduced me to Congress. And I became a bill, and I'll remain a bill until they decide to make me a law."
So here's Schoolhouse Rock's Model for Social Change. Everyone has an idea. Everyone communicates this idea to extant dominant power structures. Extant dominant power structures do their thing. Finally: social change.
I do not actually think Schoolhouse Rock is a corporatist stooge, but I think we have been very well trained to think about things in a certain way. We are held hostage by a mindset extending way beyond Congressional procedure. This mindset pictures a social movement as a group of people who have an idea and come together in common cause, and they push and they push until they make their idea happen. It is neat and clean and gives us a world where we can all get together and tackle discrete problems, and it's great except for being terribly, terribly wrong.
Take Tunisia. Early protests expressed anger at the government's treatment of a flammable small business owner. Some began protesting hunger and poverty. Unions called for jobs. Educators called for an end to corruption. Lawyers called for the government to stop beating up all the lawyers. In short: No one started out with a master plan to overthrow a dictator, with an itemized list of demands and a new happy democratic constitution all ready to go. People were angry, they got into the streets, they talked and disagreed and agreed and acted. Their demands and their message evolved. The only single concrete thing you can say about the entire revolution was that power shifted outside the barricaded fortresses that contained it for so long.
You simply cannot start a social movement with a single piece of paper that everybody is down with, something clean and concise. I mean, technically you can, if you build a movement that's top-down and authoritarian, but that movement is going to suffer the same downfalls that other authoritarian, top-down structures do. The Tunisian Revolution was in no respect top-down, and that is a big reason both why it succeeded and why whatever follows it might actually be democratic. In our own past, civil rights, labor, women's rights — these movements all had any number of people with different ideas and goals and manifestos, and no one succeeded by waiting for the perfect thing.
Plenty of people look at the Occupy movement and do not engage precisely because it falls short of the Schoolhouse Rock standard. They are right. We did not spring fully-formed from the head of a think tank, clutching a 10-point plan. Here is what is going to happen. Over the next few weeks and far beyond that, we here at Brown are going to be putting together our own ideas and grievances. We are going to be talking to each other. "We" refers to every single person who cares enough to get involved.
Occupy Providence begins in Burnside Park this Saturday. You can find Occupy College Hill pretty much everywhere online. If you want to find a way to be a part of this movement, to learn more, to help plan, to contribute something, it is not hard.
We have a society where the wealthy and the powerful are essentially synonymous. You can point to a government where leading politicians freely admit that banks basically control Congress, or to a corporatized university or to an unfettered corporate elite. It is upside down, and we are figuring out what to do about it.
The more people this "we" covers, the better.
Daniel Moraff '14 enjoys long walks on the beach. Continue not to email him.
