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Occupy Freeville?
Oct. 16th, 2011 09:26 amTrue confession time: I don’t actually get Occupy Wall Street or the Occupy movement as a whole – this despite having had Max explain it to me in words of one syllable several times: See, Mom, it’s like this…
I want to get it. Is it because I’m so mired in patriarchal attitudes that I honestly can’t understand a leaderless coup?
I’m like destitute – I mean, if I can stick it out another two years I get a comfortable pension that I should be able to live very nicely on. In the mean time it’s hard scrabble and waking up every night at two in the morning with a knot in my stomach wondering how I can come up with the NYSEG bill on top of the rent. I go on job interviews but no one really wants to hire me – I suppose because I’m old and have been out of the job market for too long. (By the way, if any of you have job leads please pass 'em along)
So it would definitely be in my own self-interests to support demands for economic justice.
But I’m not sure I can – because if you’re serious about demanding economic justice in America, then you should be serious about demanding it for the rest of the world, and if there’s economic justice for the entire world then we’d all be living on an ounce of rice and two pieces of dried seaweed a day. All privilege disappears. As fucked as things may seem to us here, Americans live like princes and princesses compared to people living in Nairobi, Lagos or Bombay. Read Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums some time. Do you really want to live like that? I don’t care how economically just it is: I don’t.
And, too, there’s always the question: Would the redistribution of the global one percent’s wealth do much to improve global living standards? Maybe it would – I honestly don’t know the answer.
In the meantime everybody’s excited because America is getting to have its very own Arab spring.
###
Instead of demands, the Occupiers have a list of things that are wrong. I do agree with them on most issues.
1. Foreclosures. Okay, I haven’t studied foreclosures in any depth but it does seem to me – having lived for many years close to the nation’s Number 2 foreclosure hot spot – that the foreclosure crisis is the result of unrealistic expectations about the nature of loans coupled with a blind belief that there was no limit to how high real estate would go. Was there a way anybody could have predicted the bottoming out of the real estate market? Probably not – the boom lasted for so long. Of course there was the eerie cautionary tale of Japan and the Lost Decade taking place in another universe far, far away but that was pretty hard to relate to when that house on the corner that sold for $225,000 three years ago was now selling for $370,000.
2. Government bailouts of big business. Totally agree with this. In fact the bailout was first intimation that nothing about New! Improved! POTUS was different except the color of the packaging. Small businesses provide most of the jobs in the US, therefore if you want to lower the unemployment rate, you funnel money to small businesses. The best way to do this is by making credit and loans from the Small Business Administration easier to come by, not by bailing out General Motors which outsources most of its manufacturing jobs to China.
3. It’s impossible to get a college education without accumulating massive debt. True. Does suck too. I was able to put myself through undergraduate and graduate school both at UC Berkeley because tuition was so-o cheap in those days – still under $3,000 25 years ago when I was in grad school. I would never be able to do that today. And really, what good is a college education? I mean, college is certainly lots of fun but unless you’re studying engineering, accounting or computer science, is there any practical end to be gained? I ask because I don't really know.
4. Broken healthcare system. Yeah. I’ve recently been a victim of this too – several weeks ago I had a really bad respiratory infection that I was sure was pneumonia. I couldn’t afford to go to an MD to get that checked out however. It cleared up on its own after 3 weeks. There was one day in particular there when I though I was going to collapse on the street and have to be carted off to the ER in an ambulance. But I didn't.
###
I suppose some of my skepticism about Occupy has to do with the fact that I was at UC Berkeley for the People’s Park round of protests – I was a child prodigy who skipped two years of school and so started college in 1968 when I was 16 years old. I remember those protests very clearly: PAR-TY!!!!!
But maybe it’s unfair to see this generation’s protest movements as the same type of thing. Today’s 20-somethings are so much more serious than we ever were. We were goofballs and pranksters, arrogant and narcissistic. The Millennials are quite the collectively minded group.
Several smart people I know think the Occupy movement will be the precursor to the formation of a viable Third Party alternative. Wouldn’t that be interesting…
I want to get it. Is it because I’m so mired in patriarchal attitudes that I honestly can’t understand a leaderless coup?
I’m like destitute – I mean, if I can stick it out another two years I get a comfortable pension that I should be able to live very nicely on. In the mean time it’s hard scrabble and waking up every night at two in the morning with a knot in my stomach wondering how I can come up with the NYSEG bill on top of the rent. I go on job interviews but no one really wants to hire me – I suppose because I’m old and have been out of the job market for too long. (By the way, if any of you have job leads please pass 'em along)
So it would definitely be in my own self-interests to support demands for economic justice.
But I’m not sure I can – because if you’re serious about demanding economic justice in America, then you should be serious about demanding it for the rest of the world, and if there’s economic justice for the entire world then we’d all be living on an ounce of rice and two pieces of dried seaweed a day. All privilege disappears. As fucked as things may seem to us here, Americans live like princes and princesses compared to people living in Nairobi, Lagos or Bombay. Read Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums some time. Do you really want to live like that? I don’t care how economically just it is: I don’t.
And, too, there’s always the question: Would the redistribution of the global one percent’s wealth do much to improve global living standards? Maybe it would – I honestly don’t know the answer.
In the meantime everybody’s excited because America is getting to have its very own Arab spring.
Instead of demands, the Occupiers have a list of things that are wrong. I do agree with them on most issues.
1. Foreclosures. Okay, I haven’t studied foreclosures in any depth but it does seem to me – having lived for many years close to the nation’s Number 2 foreclosure hot spot – that the foreclosure crisis is the result of unrealistic expectations about the nature of loans coupled with a blind belief that there was no limit to how high real estate would go. Was there a way anybody could have predicted the bottoming out of the real estate market? Probably not – the boom lasted for so long. Of course there was the eerie cautionary tale of Japan and the Lost Decade taking place in another universe far, far away but that was pretty hard to relate to when that house on the corner that sold for $225,000 three years ago was now selling for $370,000.
2. Government bailouts of big business. Totally agree with this. In fact the bailout was first intimation that nothing about New! Improved! POTUS was different except the color of the packaging. Small businesses provide most of the jobs in the US, therefore if you want to lower the unemployment rate, you funnel money to small businesses. The best way to do this is by making credit and loans from the Small Business Administration easier to come by, not by bailing out General Motors which outsources most of its manufacturing jobs to China.
3. It’s impossible to get a college education without accumulating massive debt. True. Does suck too. I was able to put myself through undergraduate and graduate school both at UC Berkeley because tuition was so-o cheap in those days – still under $3,000 25 years ago when I was in grad school. I would never be able to do that today. And really, what good is a college education? I mean, college is certainly lots of fun but unless you’re studying engineering, accounting or computer science, is there any practical end to be gained? I ask because I don't really know.
4. Broken healthcare system. Yeah. I’ve recently been a victim of this too – several weeks ago I had a really bad respiratory infection that I was sure was pneumonia. I couldn’t afford to go to an MD to get that checked out however. It cleared up on its own after 3 weeks. There was one day in particular there when I though I was going to collapse on the street and have to be carted off to the ER in an ambulance. But I didn't.
I suppose some of my skepticism about Occupy has to do with the fact that I was at UC Berkeley for the People’s Park round of protests – I was a child prodigy who skipped two years of school and so started college in 1968 when I was 16 years old. I remember those protests very clearly: PAR-TY!!!!!
But maybe it’s unfair to see this generation’s protest movements as the same type of thing. Today’s 20-somethings are so much more serious than we ever were. We were goofballs and pranksters, arrogant and narcissistic. The Millennials are quite the collectively minded group.
Several smart people I know think the Occupy movement will be the precursor to the formation of a viable Third Party alternative. Wouldn’t that be interesting…
