Yesterday's News

Having vented my spleen on what I think is the most valid point of the message, let me rant a little about the method of delivery. Before the Occupy thing got rolling, I don't recall people taking pictures of themselves holding up a single-page manifesto to get their point across. It all seems like a dodgy way to get people to read something a little more long and involved than had it been left in a place like a comment box where other readers are likely to drop the dreaded "tl;dr" hammer. (Internet shorthand for "too long; didn't read") That said, I find this pictographic way of spreading ideas to be an effective one, but symptomatic of a society increasingly unable to have intelligent conversation with each other. This smartphone manifesto approach is a decent way for people to talk at one another, but not with one another. It is a way of making a point, concluding an argument and not really allowing for a retort on equal ground. And it's not the pro-Occupy messages here that are the problem, per se. It's the way in which people are choosing to deliver those messages. I guess they are the analog of a protest sign or banner, but when mixed with the viral nature of image forwarding and Facebook linking, what you get is a trend for folks to fire the political views they agree with like shotgun blasts at one another. After a while, you just hope you don't get hit by one. How awful a thing is this as we enter a presidential campaign season that so sorely needs smart, involved conversation about where our government needs to go? It's like we have become so addicted to sound-bite political discourse that we are now resorting to the pop-up book version of it because sound bites themselves require too much thought.  

My final point, however, is this: I sent this around to some folks I know to get their feedback on it, as well as links to two separate Tumblr (photo blog) accounts – We Are the 99 Percent and We Are the 1 Percent; We Stand with the 99 Percent – the first is a photo blog of folks doing what this cancer survivor has done: telling their story by way of a single photo-document. Some of them are heartbreaking. Some of them amount to little more than first-world problems (otherwise known as white whining), especially from college students not yet out of school and already fretting about paying off student loans that are less than what the average American carries on high-interest credit card debt. But all of them are the diaspora of the Occupy movement, and here is where it gets interesting. When you look at the posting traffic of We Are the 99 Percent, it looks like the frequency has seriously tailed off as we get deeper into winter – something I expected would happen when I first visited Zuccotti Park last year. The folks I've sent these links to, and this cancer picture to? They largely met them with a collective yawn, and a gentle reminder that the Occupy movement is yesterday's news.

Indeed, by the time it is warm enough for people to comfortably gather outside again, it will be March or April, and by then the country's political dialogue won't be about Occupiers. It will be about the serious national conversation over who gets to be the next president. Maybe the Occupy movement will put a little context to that, but I kind of doubt it. I don't get that there were ever a lot of swing voters in the Occupy camp, and I also would be surprised if a savvy campaigner like Obama (regardless of his politics, the guy is a skilled campaigner) courts that sentiment too much, given that these folks blame him as much as anybody else for their problems.

The Occupy movement, even when lingering traces of it re-surface, seems to have hit an inevitable trough, and one it may very well never emerge from. I sure hope it doesn't. As far as political discourse goes – as far as actually trying to craft a reasonable solution to our current challenges as a people – the signal-to-noise ratio on Occupy was just horrible. Once you got past all of the anarchist blather and self-entitlement, what you found was a hollow movement of folks who either were always on the fringe or whose journey there was one largely of their own making. As for the legitimate hard-luck cases among them, we owe it to ourselves as a society to craft a way of life where that happens as little as humanly possible…all while admitting to ourselves the grim truth: that no matter how good we can get it, there will always be those who are on the bottom. Pretending that things could be otherwise is being dishonest, and not caring about it is being cruel. Surely there is a middle ground to be found where all can work on a solution. But as long as efforts like Occupy are around to polarize things more than raise awareness, we'll never get anything done. I say, good riddance to it. The rest of us need to get back to work.