Joy, Longing and Fear

Oct. 13th 2011:

Of course I want to Occupy Wall Street, though Toledo is a nearer city. I want to sing in a big crowd of gentle angry people … singing, singing for our lives. (Thanks to Holly Near.) I want to help fill the streets, share sandwiches, look deep into the eyes of strangers and let them look back until the strangeness vanishes.
So exciting, this new Occupy movement. In the New York Times, David Brooks and Gail Collins are disingenuously puzzled. Mayor Bloomberg is about to bring shame upon himself by forcibly evicting people from Zucotti Park. Don’t they get it? My Facebook page is filled with blood-stirring videos. Deepak Chopra (surprise!) speaks eloquently with the “human microphone” – the words repeated and passed on by many voices, echoed and re-echoed. Common Dreams and The Nation are full of smart essays. MoveOn, Credo, Act Blue – all the new-new Left cyber groups have signed up to join the Movement.
Oh, the Grand March, with banners from every group, oh the glad young faces. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round! Turn me round! Turn me round …

Then I saw the video of the NYC occupiers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and Chicago’s Jackson Street bridge surged up out of Old Memory: I was being nudged along by a cop with a billy club and sassing him by singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
I didn’t know I was a smartass. I thought I was reminding the police of a Great American Truth, if only they would listen. That’s how young I was.
Memories have kept rolling, vivid and fresh: the Michigan&Balbo melee. The Bandshell, where Alan Ginsberg desperately chanted OM in what was left of his voice Ah Ohhh UUMMM and then the police charged the audience, moving across the rows of seats, clubs swinging.
Then the excitement grew to war-lust: One, two, many Chicagos. COINTELPRO infiltrators, ugly dogmatism and rhetoric replaced with other, fresher dogmatism and rhetoric—anachronistic versions of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, ferociously argued in the Student Union. Weatherman’s Days of Rage. Explosions. Weather Underground: “We are outlaws! We are free!” I discovered nothing within me that wanted to blow things up.
But in a far corner of my soul, I am still an outlaw.
So my first reaction to Occupy Wall Street: joy. The second: fear.
Because, I thought, there will soon be leaders with bodyguards and speaking engagements, intoxicated with stories of pain and heroism. There will be villains who undermine the Movement from within as well as politicians and police eager to villainizing the occupyers. Multiple arrests. Rancorous divisions. Personal ambition, resentment, envy.