Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable, or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude, or peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized, and absurd. Hope—which is always non-violent—exposes, in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud, and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor, is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good, by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees, in our enemy, our own face. Hope is not for the practical, and the sophisticated, the cynics, and the complacent, the defeated, and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them, you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations, no. Above all, do not think. Obey.
The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, and electoral strategy, staying on message, image, and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars, or in our prison complexes, is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandahar, or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation’s capital, diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope.
Those addicted to power, enthralled with self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope, any more than the rest of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.
If we resist, and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished.
– Christopher Hedges, from a speech outside the White House fence to Veterans for Peace, Dec. 16, 2010.
Did Occupy change the world? Perhaps not. But there is a distinct possibility that it still could.
Occupy highlighted the problems we could all see, but had learned to countenance as “just the way it is.” Its constituents drew attention to economic injustice and asked the hard questions we’d all been taught to shun: Is capitalism, in its current form, meritocratic? Does it even work? Can we do better? Where is this train taking us?
Occupy revealed, in stark relief, shortcomings of both liberal democracy and the neoliberal economic system, along with the interplay between these two entities. It exposed, in many cases, the ineptitude and brutality of the police response to peaceful protest. And it uncovered the fundamental injustice of taxpayer-funded executive bonuses in the millions for those Wall Street bankers whose activities contributed to a global economic crisis, at a time when poverty and food insecurity afflict tens of millions of Americans.
But perhaps most importantly of all, Occupy inculcated in many activists a feeling of personal agency, contributing to the organization of new uprisings like the Quebec tuition revolt, Idle No More, and mass protests in Turkey, Brazil, Bulgaria, and elsewhere.
“The conversation has changed fundamentally” in activist circles, Sitrin maintains. “People feel a different kind of empowerment…saying ‘Wait a minute! We’re not the ones who are making the problem here. And we’re not going to be blamed anymore for it.”
Occupy was “a re-awakening of our collective power,” she says.
Occupy’s spirit endures, although its encampments have been uprooted—sometimes violently—by law enforcement. The conditions that incited the movement remain. Strike Debt was born last year, with the objective of emancipating debtors at random. Occupy Sandy continues, a grass-roots endeavour to collaborate with and build upon the efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Activists in neighbourhoods across the contiguous U.S. are organizing to curtail home foreclosures and evictions, with some even occupying abandoned houses on behalf of displaced families. And in 2013, uprisings in various countries have persuaded governments—including the administration of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil—to change tack, perhaps in the realization that the game of repression, in an age of social media and streaming cellphone video, is one they are increasingly unlikely to win.
In the hearts of those devoted to the dream of a better future, the fire of conviction still burns, quelled but not doused.
“I still get goosebumps thinking about Occupy,” says Reyes. “[The fall of 2011] was the time for that movement to happen, but I think the failure was also meant to happen. No movement is meant to last forever, right?”
Having had time to contemplate the true significance of Occupy within the bigger picture, Reyes says her understanding has shifted. Occupy was not the be-all and end-all, she believes, but rather represented a single wave in a vast ocean of hope.
“After Occupy came Idle No More” and the Quebec uprisings, she says. “But I think at every turn, every wave, we tweak, and we kind of examine what happened before…Even Occupiers knew that Occupy was not unique, that it’s been building, that it comes with the global energy, that something is not right.”
“And there will be a different [movement], under a different name, or maybe no name. But I think every time [the wave] comes, it comes stronger, and it comes bigger.”
One of the key achievements of social movements, in Reyes’s view, is the shift they effect in the public conversation. After all, she asks, who was talking about bankers, or switching to a credit union, before Occupy came along?
“We tend to forget the little victories…and we might not be able to get rid of a government, but I think change is already happening…and it’s not going to be overnight. But we’re all doing the best we can, the best way we know how,” she says.
“And I get really hopeful about it, because I realize that [the desire for change] will not die down.”
As a physical entity and subject of media fascination, Occupy came and went, effecting only modest changes. However, social movements reveal their character not necessarily in their own successes and failings, but in the zeitgeist of the era in which they arise. In the 1930s, a deep depression afflicted much of the Western world, and the capitalistic market democracies were thrust into conflict with alternate—and in some cases, extreme—ideologies like fascism, communism, anarcho—syndicalism and socialism. In the turbulent 1960s, war was ravaging Vietnam, the menace of nuclear annihilation loomed, the baby boom generation was coming of age, and people of colour in America were emboldened to fight for equality at the ballot box, before the judiciary, and in the eyes of society. And in 2011, after decades of mounting inequality and environmental carnage, the worst economic collapse in the capitalistic democracies since the 1929 stock market crash, massive bailouts for corporate interests at the expense of the citizenry, and the realization by many of the inadequacies of the traditional configuration of parliamentary democracy, organizers and activists in New York City decided the time had come to vocalize grievances once again. Their message met with sympathy in many other countries and jurisdictions in which neoliberal capitalism has prevailed since the 1970s, and in which citizens perceive their governments to have let them down.
Occupy may have dissipated from the public consciousness, but much of the popular discontent that precipitated it remains, or has intensified since 2011. That more uprisings are on the way seems inevitable, even if they bear a different name or assume a different form.
Rather than a climax, then, the annals of history may well record Occupy as an omen of more intense and sustained social upheaval on the horizon.