A movement built on the idea that everyone can speak for themselves is so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation that it has flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
Michael:
Rolling Stone has two articles this week on OWS. They are both noeworthy for the depth of understanding they reflect, especially Matt Taibbi's piece. He had something of an epiphany about the movement that enabled him to break out of his progressive/liberal box to a significant degree. However, he has not yet moved far out enough to grasp that in being "so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation" that one of the fundamental thrusts of Occupy is to re-think our economics and politics from the ground up. I posted my response and a link to the GEO article Occupy! Connect! Create!
Jeff Sharlet's article covers a lot of the same territory as other good reports on what is going on inside OWS. It's valuable becasue he does it wel, but especially so because towards the end he reports on his being in the middle of a dialogue about the nature of Occupy between several occupiers and a traditional leftist with the intention to be the "voice for the voiceless." Powerful reporting there.
Enjoy.
Inside Occupy Wall Street
How a bunch of anarchists and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags launched a nationwide movement by not being a "voice for the voiceless"
Jeff Sharlet
November 10, 2011
Read the article:
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Going on strike from one's own culture
Matt Taibbi
November 10, 2011
...Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
Read the article:
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