How will this decade fit into humanity’s story? Will it be a golden age, or a dark age? Or both, or neither? I’m looking forward to watching 2010’s period piece movies full of authentically reproduced cowboy mustaches, half-shaved heads and vape pens.
We’re only a little past halfway done with this decade, but barring something really big happening in the next four years, like World War III, it might be known, at least partially, as a time of awkward, painful social change. 2011 saw the brief eruptions of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, and in the last several years America has directly considered the often violent, biased, exploitative and consequence-free behavior of its police forces, thanks in part to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Occupy was ephemeral, but it wasn’t fruitless. It focused America’s attention on income inequality, and made “the 99 percent” and “the 1 percent” concepts and phrases everyone uses, accepts and is aware of, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. The zeitgeist it channeled has found expression in the campaigns to raise the minimum wage and the Bernie Sanders campaign. In the end, Americans love rebellion and want to feel like they’re on the side of the underdog. Many of the 2016 Republican candidates alluded to solving America’s vast wealth gap, if only vaguely, and even Donald Trump, who affects the image of a nihilistic Übermensch billionaire, feels compelled to throw some outrage over money in politics in his speeches.
People of all walks of life and political persuasions got involved in the movement, and because OWS was a “movement,” not an organization, whoever you were, you were part of Occupy if you wanted to be. Whether you were showing up in Zuccotti Park or Pershing Square because you were a libertarian angry about collusion between private and public interests, an anarcho-communist who wanted to dismantle the state entirely, or an apolitical person fueled by an inarticulate sense of dissatisfaction and resentment, you were Occupy Wall Street. It ended up being, like the Obama-era Republican Party, an unstable identity-less alliance of vastly different philosophies with only anger at a common enemy to give it shape. The human instinct to vaguely think of a group one isn’t involved in as a hive mind with shared, identical thoughts, feelings and goals led people to see the wildly disparate collective of individuals who together formed OWS, especially those who saw the group as an enemy, as one stupid, indecisive person in a V mask reproduced thousands of times. I remember hearing conservative radio talk show hosts referring to Occupy as “these kids,” assuming that everyone protesting was a shallow, well-off 20-something trying to relive the '60s.
The fact that OWS struggled nobly to represent as many of the numerous grievances its members had as possible through direct democracy, and not only that, but somehow try to cobble together a unifying message or theme out of them, lent it to some criticism and dismissal. For example, this statement released by the general assembly in New York condemns corporations for everything from “perpetuating discrimination” to “the torture and murder of civilians,” and was mocked for appearing to blame all the evils of the world on the Fortune 500. The entire purpose of a corporation is vagueness, the dispersal of responsibility through a crowd until it fades and vanishes. If you’re an outraged beat disillusioned American, the vagueness of corporations lends itself to blame as much as innocence.
If the rage of Occupy Wall Street mostly expressed itself as a cloud of euphoric hope, Black Lives Matter has more of an atmosphere of focused anger. It is a uniquely American movement, rather than an international one, and has specific goals to present to the world. Its activists' Campaign Zero, a continuously updated list of demands, are reasonable, well-articulated, concentrated around the group’s central issue-accountability for police-and presented with a classy minimalist layout. It even has a chart detailing which presidential candidates support which items on the list (both Trump and Clinton support funding for police body cameras).
While the cult of the police that still exists to some extent in this country might render some of the group’s proposals unimaginable, like the creation of a separate government entity to investigate police misconduct, I’d like to think that pretty much everyone can get behind the end of “for-profit policing,” the practice of benefitting from the sale of seized evidence. We’ll see. In the wake of the police killings of several black men in the past two weeks, and the killings of five police officers in Dallas, the messages will be harder to dismiss or ignore.