Happy 2 Year Anniversary Occupy Wall Street: The Seeds Have Been Sown

I get caught up in thinking what I do has no value. Except that I know how many other people are afraid to do it. I also know how many sit around seething about what I do and say. If how I live my life was so meaningless it shouldn’t ruffle as many feathers. When many people take the time to tell you that what you do doesn’t matter, it would seem to me that is actually does. Based on how upset it makes some people. Dropping out of life to become a writer doesn’t make anyone happy except for the person doing it, and her loyal readers. <3 All Day All Week Occupy Wall Street. 

I have a bunch of pens like the ones I like to write with in beautiful colors. I don’t use them because I kill pens. Ballpoint pens in my hand are doomed to a short life. So using the same color all the time feels better than wasting beautiful pinks and blues on words. I should draw with them. I don’t draw much ever. I used to a lot in school, just to pass the time. 30 hours a week is a lot of time to waste when much of it is poorly planned out and meaningless. 

If you want to, you can all Occupy Wall Street in your daily lives. Move your money from a big bank to a local bank in your town, while they still exist. Support teachers and their unions. For that matter support all unions. Don’t accept emotional and verbal abuse anywhere in your life, especially not your job since you will spend a majority of your life there. 

Even careers you love that you choose will involve work. By nature that is what a job is, to work. To contribute. We all want to. It is important that we do what makes us happy because even when we believe in what we do, there will be a lot of hard days. Those hard days are easier to muster through when you know what you’re doing is a meaningful contribution to society and perhaps the future. Those of us who love many children in our daily lives cannot help but to care about the future. 

I’m often fascinated with how some people chose to use social media. The greatest ability to connect that has existed in all of human civilization. Over 1 billion people tuned in, over 1/7^th of the global population in participation. Why not all of it? A lot of opinions and points of view are still left out of the equation. I find it more interesting how many people have this power to connect and do nothing with it. They don’t share happy moments, they don’t talk about sports, or complain about what troubles them. Some people just sit back and stalk. They read everything in their feed, they obsessively watch YouTube or whatever their favorite media, Hulu, Netflix, cable T.V. but they never contribute anything themselves. 

There is a lot of fear surrounding the internet. What I say can never be taken back?? Good thing everyone is a new person from one moment to the next. People say stupid things out loud all day every day. No reason to be ashamed of those stupid things said and done on the internet. What we need is a new set of etiquette. A new way to treat our friends and family based on what we do and don’t think and do and don’t approve of with how they use the internet. Millions use it to have a few drinks, pop a few pills, and fill their lonely void with sexual images. Porn is everywhere. Sexualization of women and children is everywhere. I’d prefer an internet with less secrecy for the likes of bankers and sex slave traders and more secrecy for disenfranchised peoples of the world to speak out. 

The media on today’s anniversary: all the “blog” posts I read from major news networks had all the Shit to Talk about Occupy Wall Street. Well here is my Love Letter to the movement that changed my world into something I can see better. The other “blogs”, I use the quotes because anything published in the New York Times is no blog, spent today talking about squalor and inconvenience demonstrating again their privilege and inability to understand how the other half of the world lives. The police showed up in force with large numbers for the rally today of less than a couple hundred people. Still demonstrating why those of us fear getting in the streets because of the abuse and trauma caused by the NYPD.

There was a mass media campaign to belittle and diminish the numbers and size of the movement, not from day one, at first they just ignored it and hoped it would go away. When encampments started to spring up in other cities around the country and around the globe the news had to cover it… finally. And cover it they did. The controlled media that has been in charge of the national, and often global because we’re America "the wealthy nation", dialog since the days of President Nixon turned that thing right on its head. 

We don’t even know the message. “We are the 99%!” What’s not to get? “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” What’s not to get. “World Peace” is this complicated? “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” This has been a staple of peaceful non-violent, resistance to power, movements since we figured out there was another way to fight. We don’t have to fight other civilians in war; we can fight the powers that be with words and unity. What a beautiful thing to be reminded of. 

Since those early days of OWS I have revived my love of history, the true history, not the history of our rulers but the ones who fought for what rights we think we have left. Rights are never given by the elite; they are demanded by the masses. I even saw the word “radical” used again today. I love that word. I want to be radical, it reminds me of cheesy ‘80s movies and hang ten also known as “hang loose” fingers. 

I felt like a stunted “holy mother” SAHM version of myself before Occupy Wall Street changed my life. It reminded me that one voice can be the voice of many. I wasn’t even a SAHM, I worked all the time. I was constantly stressed out. I didn’t know how to enjoy the little moments with my son anymore because everything was about how we were always late for something. Always striving for perfection in the schedule. Now he does amazing in school. I went from not always knowing what to tell him, to always telling him the truth. 

I spent last winter reconnecting with my childhood self. I recently found out that people who can’t remember their childhood well are prone to depression. I find those of us who have childhood’s not always worth remembering, wind up as depressed adults. Some people use drugs to forget, but that is dangerous and illegal, some of us use wine, some use food, some use sex, there is a whole manner of things you can drown yourself in instead of getting to the root of who you are at the core. 

Now that I know I feel so much better, my entire goal in writing is to share that feeling with others. Even on the darkest days now, I can see the beauty, I can see the light. I am not by any means who people would call a happy person. I am often considered depressed and lacking a sense of humor. I noticed today I had all the habits of happy people. I exercise when I feel bleak, I smile a lot, and I laugh at horrible things. I have a very complex sense of humor. I don’t laugh at easy jokes anymore, “Family Guy” humor I sometimes call it. I don’t want something iconic to me, just referenced, without a real joke to accompany it, to make me laugh. I don’t want to see the exploitation of women or their bodies to make me laugh. And therefore much or mainstream media is lacking in artistic output for me. I’d like to argue that it is lacking in artistic representations of most of us and what beauty we like and what humor we love. 

I know Occupy Wall Street had an impact because I remember what people talked about before it. I’ve worked in a hair salon my entire life, I have seen a shift or two in popular culture and social norms in my day. I was there from 4 years old to 27 years old and I am still there sometimes. I still hear the stories from my mom. She has always been my greatest resource of wisdom because I don’t know anyone who has more real meaningful connections, hands on, with people. The only things that may come close are my teaching, nursing, or social worker friends and family, taking physical care of those in need and suffering. 

We all have the opportunity in our lives. We can choose to really connect with everyone we come in contact with. It is hard to field sadness and complaints in a world full of frustrated people in pain. It’s not how hard we work that causes the pain; it is the disconnection to people we love or see every day. 

We are human beings, we love to work hard. We love to push the boundaries on our physical bodies to see what can be accomplished in this realm. The problem is we don’t have time for that. From the cubicle. From the desk. From the classroom full of too many kids who need too much help for one person alone. Those of us with jobs are stretched too thin and those of us without have no resources at all, and are shamed for those we may have left. 

With the ridicule it faces now in the popular culture I know many people out there who are afraid to tell their family, coworkers, or bosses that in their day to day grind Occupy Wall Street meant hope for them. They didn’t discuss it but they silently hoped this vagabond mix of lovers and fighters camped out in cities around the world, challenging the powers that be, would succeed. They may have faded away to irrelevancy in daily dialog because of the shame that has been attached to being “one of them” but the changes are magnanimous. They get none of the credit but they are the reason that things like, income inequality, are phrases in your vernacular. 

Before Occupy Wall Street no one was talking about problems. We were all caught up in "positive thinking" culture , blaming ourselves for not being happy enough with what we have. We blamed depressed and frustrated people, people in foreclosure, people suffering health problems for their own problems. “Personal responsibility” and all, some of us still do. But a lot of us have come to realize that the deck is stacked against us. 

I am one of the world 1% wealthiest people in the world. (In the world, not the country.) Keep that in mind, me unemployed writer, living in poverty, paycheck to paycheck, whatever words you chose to describe it. I have running water, I have a fridge, and I have T.V.’s, no cable, but lots of movies from when we had more money. Most importantly I have the internet. I have an xbox360 that can connect me with people around the globe, to play games, recreation with friends where ever they are, and people I’ve never met IRL if I want. With all these magical things I have very little power to change things. 

The world’s inequality is out of control. I get to feel grateful that I am not squatting over  a shit stream behind my house, wondering how the coca-cola got to the local cigarette stand/market. But I am powerless to tell the trillionaire bankers and crooks who run the media and run this shit that I want those people housed and fed sanitarily, with dignity, because We Need Them, they contains ideas and perspectives We Don’t Have. 

How could Occupy have succeeded more when the billionaire owned media is one of our primary problems? I’ve seen the words Occupy Wall Street come out of President Obama’s mouth on the 49^th Anniversary of MLK’s March on Washington at his monument’s dedication. The reason we don’t see protests in the streets now is because of the arrests and abuse of militarized police forces around the country. 

I know I myself stayed away thinking of my son. I have been envious of people who went anyway, journalists and activists who risk their time and money and reputations in the name of social justice. Someday my son will be old enough to take care of himself. There is a certain group of people who know even today with all the changes I’ve made and as confident as I’ve become with really putting it out there in my writing and telling you how it is, know I am still holding back. There is still a lot more to come. 

If it wasn’t for Occupy Wall Street there would be a lot less hope for many of us. We may not be able to go to militarized big cities and risk arrest and our children’s future. But we were always watching. Many of us still are, many of us silently. We know something is wrong, we work in our daily lives from the position of changing fundamentally the way things are so we all have a brighter future. 

The media may write today like Occupy withered and died instead of was beaten to death by the NYPD and Oakland in an organized wave of violence that swept the nation and sent us back into our homes. But we all do little things now, in little groups, in our home towns, in our smaller communities. We have all done something better because Occupy Wall Street was the first movement to show how useful social media can be. It doesn’t have to be just one more avenue of pain and one more way for our families and friends to judge our lives. It can be a means for greater understanding, an easier and faster way to share with large amounts of people than there ever was before. 

Love isn’t linear. Love is a network. Love is a web. We have globalized world news and a globalized economy. When really our immediate communities is where we have the most effect. I know I’ve had an effect. Those who support me don’t give me that, my supporters give me love and understanding, which is what everyone needs and I am incomprehensibly lucky in that aspect of life. The people whose skin I get under, who have to question things they otherwise wouldn’t question because I exist. I am a normal woman, I was raised very Catholic, I am a typical mom who likes to make her kid a sandwich but prefers their not be chemicals in it. Being poorer than being able to afford chemical free food is a worry. But the future is for worries. 

At least I know about these things and I know I am an active catalyst just by being and seeing these things change. You just have to know. You have to wonder about life, everything about it. Connect with the younger, less bitter version of ourselves. Connect with what you wanted before the world told us we couldn’t have it. 

Occupy reminded us that there are those of us out there who want love to be more important than fear. Occupy set the wheels in motion for so many subtle changes in the media and American minds. It was always and still is an advertising campaign the likes of other media only instead of advertising dollars the goal is for social change. It was the first attempt at a brand in the hands of the working class. It was almost a success. Now we know who is out there. A lot of people have stood up. How much of the internet should be controlled by the people? All of it. The information we produce should belong to us. Not Facebook and Google for marketing purposes. This world is bullshit. You know it. Occupy Wall Street. 

We have begun to Occupy our lives and we have Occupied minds and that will make these changes start to happen. Immediacy isn’t how things work. History knows this. The modern generation doesn’t. We are used to instant gratification. We don’t know about the seeds of change and all of that. But they have been sown.