What's The Idea, Occupy?

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events;

small minds discuss people. -Eleanor Roosevelt

On the front page of our local rag was a picture of an Occupy protester holding up a cardboard sign that read, “You can’t evict an idea”.  The sign was in response to the city’s eviction notice which the protesters’ are refusing to honour.It got me thinking about the various conversations I’ve had over the past couple of weeks with some of the folks from Occupy in various parts of North America and Europe.

While each camp has its own issues, the one thing almost all of them agree is that everything is the fault of corporations. They see corporations as evil, greedy and corrupt. Putting aside for a moment that this is a more than simplistic perspective of the world, I ask them what they propose to change that but never get an answer.

Instead, I first get examples of how corporations are evil. When I ask again what they propose to change it, I get the add-on that governments are evil too because they cater to corporations. When I point out that it isn’t just corporations that attempt to influence governments but unions and other special interest groups, I then get a tirade about wealth inequality. When I ask what Occupy proposes to do to change that, I get called an idiot.

I won’t debate that I’m and idiot, others outside of Occupy have called me that before so there may be some truth to it but here’s the thing. Where is the idea that Occupy claims can’t be evicted? Despite the best efforts of people like Van Jones who tried to sell the idea that it wasn't up to Occupy to come up with ideas, the simple fact is that protest without ideas is nothing but complaining.

Gandhi’s idea was an independent, self-governing India, free of British colonialism. Martin Luther King’s idea (or dream) was of a nation where all were free and equal; a nation where racial intolerance had been defeated. Where is the Occupy idea?

In fact, there doesn’t appear to be one beyond defending their tent cities, their marches and their general assemblies. It is a movement that seems to exist for one purpose only, to criticize and to complain.

OWS recently published its Declaration Of Occupy and I downloaded and read it with the intent of finally understanding what ideas Occupy was proposing. It was a written version of their protest, nothing but a long, tedious list of perceived injustices and a brief statement at the end about change but with no concrete initiatives. It was like the American Declaration of Independence with the declaring independence part removed.

On Sunday night, I watched the tweets from the OWS GA in which one of their committees presented a proposed vision statement for OWS. Two things struck me. The first was that once again there were no ideas, just the usual Utopian ideals that bear no resemblance to the real world. The second was that it seemed odd for a committee to be trying to create a vision for an organization rather that apparently had been up and running for a couple of months without one.

It seemed to me that it would be like Gandhi setting about protesting for a bit and then asking his followers what it was they actually wanted to do about what they were protesting.

It is the lack of ideas that exposes Occupy for what it is. It is not a movement for change, it is discontent and it is discontent without any idea of what to do about it except complain.

Discontent is a legitimate feeling and in democracies, people have the right to voice their discontent. Just don’t call it an idea. There are no ideas in Occupy, just discontent and that means there are no solutions to the problems we need to address.

It’s time for Occupy to move on and let the rest of us get back to work at trying to fix things. There are more ideas in the real 99% than have or ever will come out of Occupy; not because they are necessarily stupid but because they exist to complain. They are not invested in the broader communities in which they live, only in themselves and that is such a small part of the North American population, it doesn’t come close to the  30,000 who marched in Wisconsin on the weekend in support of a recall of their state governor.

That’s the difference between protest with purpose and protest to complain. One has an idea and acts on it. The other has nothing but ….well…complaints and we have enough of that already. We don’t need Occupy to waste our time, vandalize our cities or cost us millions just to hear more complaints.

We already know the complaints. We share them but unlike Occupy, we’re working to do something about them.

The Declaration Of Occupy New York
http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/

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