Early in Elie Wiesel's "Night", his terrifying story about The Holocaust, he describes an exchange with his rebbi mentor who tells him, "Every question possesses a power which is lost in the answer." Later the rebbi answers the question why he prays to which he says, "I pray to the God in me so that I might ask the real questions."
If you've read the book, the story becomes a progressive horror as Wiesel's family is relocated, then separated enroute to a concentration camp. All this to the background refrain "that it could be worse." And of course it does.
There are two points here.
One, is a didactic about OWS: it is a magnet for questions, a veritable black hole for them. It's so resolutely inscrutable as to lose newly converted liberal types eager for an "ask list." Some even re-frame the movement as religious, e.g, "what historic Christianity and OWS have in common." I'm guilty of that one.
Amin Husain patiently corrects all this with, "it's a economic and social movement with moral overtones." And how it loves questions! But pressed to provide answers, the questions are reduced to someone's sense of a solution based on what they know. What we know is that the current system for all its assurances of faux order is rigged. 1% get the lion's share; the 99% fight over the scraps. Even docile churches join it to keep everything in place.
The questions will remain questions until the dominant culture listens to the people, the 99%. Again, Amin,"...and this is what makes it radical to a too-ready-for-the answer prone culture." That is the calmer, well thought out definition of "radical." What could be more radical than for the 99% to change the conversation so their government and their society finally listens?
And the second point: the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act following the truly horrendous Supreme Court Decision on "Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission" of January 21, 2010 have become the dark Tweedledum and Tweedledee of our day. Not only can corporations breath; they can get pissed off and vengeful about it too. This brought Chris Hedges to say this at the end of his recent post on Truthdig:
But the NDAA passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.
By my reference to Wiesel above, don't think this entry is seeking a comparison with the atrocities of the Nazis. That stands alone in its depravity. Survivors live to beckon us to remember and to engage the nobler parts of ourselves. (That statement deserves a pause and its own reverence.)
But there is haste here as well--in his later writings Wiesel is quickened not because he was chosen but because he was a witness. Injustice can seem perpetual and ingenious if we are absent. Said Wiesel in his 1986 Nobel Prize reception speech on the causes for human indignity, "we must choose which side we are on", and, "the answer to indifference is action." In his speech he asks us--in effect--"what have we witnessed and what are we doing about it with the life we have been given?"
I am witness to injustice and pain because of a system stolen from the people. This translates into hunger, poverty, homelessness, and fear.
For me, this means an open-ended commitment to Occupy. What about you?
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From Martin Luther King, Jr's sermon "A Knock at Midnight":
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. If the church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause men everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will. But if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of mankind and fire the souls of men, imbuing them with a glowing and ardent love for truth, justice, and peace. Men far and near will know the church as a great fellowship of love that provides light and bread for lonely travellers at midnight.
At first, I didn't understand OWC. I asked, "What do they want? What are their demands?" And then, I visited the Occupy camp in New Orleans and talked to the people there, who would not provide a specific list of demands. Then, I asked, "Why are you here?" Each person I asked gave a different answer, but I understood what the Occupiers were about. All the different answers added up to taking a stand against injustices so widespread in our society. "We are the 99%, and no one is paying attention to us, so we are here."
These are some of the most cogent comments I've read in awhile. I'm quoting you, quoting MLK. Very grateful!
Of course, that should be OWS, not OWC.
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