Occupy.

"It's a revolution!", Tyler said with enthusiasm. I couldn’t help but feel that I was watching the birth of a childhood fantasy. It was October of 2011, in upstate New York. I was living on a collectively-managed herb farm amongst yoga instructors, hicksters, vagabonds, artists, chefs, sustainability experts, and an aerospace engineer. It was a menagerie of alternative lifestyle advocates, loosely organized under the belief that we were reconnecting with the land we had lost connection with. There wasn't a farmer amongst us, and nearly everyone had grow up in an urban environment. The claim that we had lost something was, at best, theoretical. Something we had seen in a documentary, or perhaps a byproduct of the middle-class guilt we feel over the blessing that we know we didn't earn. What this lifestyle gave us was entitlement. The system we were born into, intuitively, felt broken. The systems of food, economics, class, social roles, gender, and profession all left us feeling dehumanized and disenfranchised. We felt barcoded and commodified, and going back to the land was our boldest attempt at civil disobedience. Despite the occasional appearance of a Che Guevara t-shirt, this was civil disobedience akin to Gandhi; non-violent, and culturally petulant. We were representatives of a generation that has been coddled, praised, and told that we could do anything. We were terrified of criticism and hardship, and had developed a deep fear of authority. As such, we had no leaders. We followed no example. This was intended to be the opposite of working life. The rat race was powerless here. There was no position of authority to strive for, or limitation on what a person could be or experiment with. Collectively, we would support each other, thereby eliminating the existential terror that results from career failure. All we needed was enough food to survive, and the group. It was a reclamation of our imagined community. We shared meals together, worked together, played together, and discussed ourselves. Something that was silently agreed upon was that we would never resort to anger, or even speak with it. Occupy Wall Street changed that. It wasn't that we were afraid of anger, it was that we were afraid of it being directed at us. We were a sample of a generation that had been taught to fear and repress anything that could lead to aggression. Whether or not we allowed ourselves to realize the sadness and rage that boiled inside of us was irrelevant, we now had an outlet. 

I grew up in the Puget Sound, where I was raised to be an environmentalist. I believe in that. I can't say that I know that I would have turned to it if I were born in a less empathetic city. I am, to some degree, a product of my environment. In another situation, I could have become my antithesis. Others have, but how could I claim to be understanding if I refuse to consider their circumstances? That’s what I would think in order to calm myself. The truth is that my seething anger towards the oppressive is restrained only by my feelings of impotence and disconnection to a solution. Selfishness and ignorance have created evils all around us, and what I am supposed to do to stop it? What could we do? The best chance was to apply ourselves to a field that we could use as a platform for our ideals. We would take out loans, get an education, get a job, pay off our loans, and do something meaningful. This is America, after all. We’ve been told our entire lives that hard work and an education will get you to success. The folks on the farm were a sample of the larger situation facing the young today. There were people with masters and bachelors degrees in psychology, fine art, engineering, education, business management, culinary arts, communications, and aerospace engineering. Despite this, all of us were essentially unemployed, without prospects. The American dream was bullshit. When I started college, a bachelor’s degree would make you stand apart. By the time I graduated, a master’s was hardly enough. We had been promised so much, and we only received indifference from a fickle job market. We knew the bar had been set high, but it seemed as if it raised with the unemployment rate. We were lost. We had no direction, no example to follow, and no leaders. We tried to stay hopeful, but it was hard to ignore how powerless we were. All we could do was watch in horror as everything of value was commodified and processed. Except for us. We weren’t even useful enough for exploitation. 

It had never been so apparent that the system favors a select few, while the rest of us do what we can with the scraps that they have yet to recycle. Occupy Wall Street came along, and gave us the power to speak up. All of us. Unfortunately, we approached this opportunity with the same confusion we bring to everything else. Rather than create an identity that may fail to satisfy everyone, we pulled in every disenfranchised, cultural outlier as a sign of solidarity. The intention was to be altruistic, but it was a poor strategy. This protest of “American fairness” included every subversive voice that had a desire to be heard, and, not surprisingly, the resulting cacophony was deafening. We were confused. The people that bothered to listen to us were confused. The people that tried to criticize us were confused. What were we for? No one knew. What were we against? If one included every opinion that was present, the answer was everything. We were against everything. We also had no demands. None. A protest, if nothing else, desires for a change of….. something. Generally there is some kind of a request. Voting rights for women, desegregation of school, the end of English imperialism, or breaking up a quasi-secret, international business cartel. What did we have? Bicycle generators, tents, the people’s megaphone, who knows. It ought to have been to promote urban camping. This wasn’t helping. We had the numbers but no unifying purpose.Without purpose, how could we find strength? Whatever message could be found was diluted in a sea of varying opinions. It was maddening. If one were to take a look at the picket signs that were found at an Occupy protest, there was rarely a unifying theme. Every political, cultural, or philosophical issue that took place in the last decade could be found on one of those signs. Considering this, I can’t blame anyone that had a hard time taking this seriously.