Time and Place

Having had no plans for celebration on New Year’s Eve and no genuine cause for celebration, I undertook a long and meandering walk late that evening, stretching from my home to downtown Buffalo some six miles away. Holidays like that one are not at all my scene, and in observing the crowds, I alternate between enjoyment and derision. Whether centered in the Elmwood Village, or Allentown, or the ball-drop festivities along Main Street, most of what I saw at the close of 2011 seemed quite run-of-the-mill. So when I plunged into the crowd at Buffalo’s one major public event for the evening, I was made exceptionally upset by just one thing.

It didn’t take long after arriving until I noticed a cluster of signs being held in the air in part of the crowd. I think it’s pretty natural that my first thought was that they might simply be homemade slogans regarding the start of the New Year. It took me just another moment to see what they were. Every one of the eight or ten signs read “Ron Paul 2012,” with not an ounce of variation in phrasing, font, or color scheme. A couple of minutes later, I realized why they were clustered in exactly the location they were. It was just behind their group that the local ABC affiliate had set up its tent with elevated cameras in fixed positions for coverage of the event.

The families at home in the area who tuned in to watch a carefree, universal gathering of other locals were treated instead to what I can only assume was two solid hours of bobbing campaign signs, and little else. I actually made an effort to yell out to the Ron Paul devotees the question of whether people at home might have been interested in something other than a small group’s political message, but I don’t think I was heard over the noise of the crowd. There is some saving grace in that, I suppose. It’s good to know that the people encircling that contingent of misplaced advocates were having a good time, even if the ones at home were being prevented that.

If I’d had the opportunity to engage in a discussion with those people, I can only assume that I would have gotten some sort of response along the lines that it’s a free country and that I had no business trying to stifle their free speech. What bombastic people seem frequently to forget about the Constitution is that the guarantee of free speech rights doesn’t mean that it’s always right to use your speech to be a complete asshole.

I’m all for standing up for what one believes in and broadcasting one’s message through whatever channels are available, and I’ll encourage anyone to do so, even if his views are ones that I don’t remotely agree with. But there’s a time and a place for everything; and a completely apolitical, celebratory local event is nearly as inappropriate a place for group advocacy of a national political cause as is a veteran’s funeral.

It made me terrifically sad to see so many people ringing in the New Year with such a complete lack of self-awareness, ethics, and restraint. If there’s one good thing to be said for it, it’s that such a public show of obtuse behavior may drive away large numbers of people, not necessarily from Ron Paul’s candidacy, but certainly from such aggressively intrusive activism.

OWS and My Place on the Sidelines

I need to turn this blog back to a stricter focus on the concept of breaking points, and I need to see that my voice curves around the theme. Primarily, that means being less shy about my righteous indignation. The best of my opinions tend to come of situations wherein I have roughly equivalent ire for both sides of an issue. So it is with the Occupy Wall Street protests. In being essentially asked to choose between the two camps, I feel I’m expected to align myself either with a population of self-righteous assholes who hold to the counter-intuitive view than anyone under the age of thirty-five who has a college degree shouldn’t be taken seriously or with a massive cluster fuck of activists who have no organizational skills or sense of proportion. If absolutely compelled to take a side with one or the other, of course I’ll take the cluster fuck, but as with so many of these things, I really wish there was another option. That is, I wish there was another position to take aside from on either team or on the sidelines.

The majority of the criticism I have been seeing levied against the Occupy Wall Street movement has been predictably cynical and obnoxious. It generally follows the line of reasoning advanced on the national political stage by Hermann Cain: that many thousands of disaffected, disenfranchised people protesting in lower Manhattan and across the country are unfairly targeting their anger at financial institutions and the status quo when they should be blaming themselves for problems such as poverty and joblessness. I encountered one passive-aggressive commentator who identified the movement as being “pro-sloth” and expecting compensation for laziness.

I am increasingly finding myself drawn toward the uncomfortable belief that some people simply cannot be reasoned with. More than that, I may find myself trending towards the worse assumption that people in general can’t be reasoned with when they are being challenged to understand the motivations of ideological opponents. Why is it that otherwise intelligent people take up the most simplistic, intellectually deficient explanations when people they disagree with become highly visible? Hermann Cain aside, I don’t imagine that most conservative observers of the Occupy Wall Street protests are stupid, and yet they are prone to the most foolishly arrogant characterizations of an entire movement. It appears to me that instead of putting forth the effort to observe the participants closely, such people compensate for the discomfort of not understanding them in the slightest by claiming that they understand them perfectly, and that their movement is so simple a thing to understand that there is no reason at all to take it seriously.

That, of course, is bullshit. And yet at the same time there are good reasons not to take it seriously. Much of the media has focused attention on the obvious flaw in the movement that is its lack of a coherent narrative. That is a profoundly serious problem, and though it should be sufficient grounds for criticism on its own, a secondary consequence of that fact is that it makes the movement easier to criticize on irrational, irrelevant, hyperbolic grounds. The fact is that the movement’s opponents will undercut its significance without a second though no matter what, but a lot more is gained if the fight is over the actual message, and not over the personal character of all of the disorganized individuals jostling to express a message that is unique to them and their friends.

I did enough protesting in college that I know that this is just exactly what liberal activism in the twenty-first century looks like. I think it was because I already had a decent mind for branding that it pissed me off when I was twenty and within it as it does now, when I’m twenty-six and watching from the outside. I attended rallies that I thought were in opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq, but as I wandered the crowd I found that they were apparently also about Israel and abortion and gay rights and socialism and drug policy and 9-11 conspiracy theory. And every secondary cause that was represented at every such rally distracted attention from the one thing that everyone had supposedly come together for. It is impossible to take a movement seriously if it is little more than a breeding ground for diverse, disconnected ideas that just happen to originate from the same side of the political spectrum.

Since I’ve already entertained one or two uncomfortable notions in this post, here’s another: Liberalism, precisely by virtue of being liberal, is a weak political cause. We are receptive to other views, and despite the fiery passion of very many liberal activists, most of the ostensibly liberal elements of the political establishment are deferent and eager to compromise. And why shouldn’t they be if their constituency can’t commit to one clear, unequivocal demand without cluttering their advocacy with a chorus of secondary considerations? Why, if the firebrands on the ground are willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed liberal, shouldn’t those in power, who must necessarily be more moderate, be willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed rational?

Unity is one thing at which conservatism, ideological monstrosity that it often is, beats liberalism hands-down. It’s a vulgar kind of unity – the kind that’s achieved by excluding certain opinions, sometimes the most reasonable ones – but it certainly is effective. Down on Wall Street, there’s a protest going on about a million different things, even according to its own participants, but those who are ideologically invested in disregarding it can all agree, even though it’s insanely idiotic to do so, that the noise is coming from a bunch of entitled slackers who would simply rather shout than work. Unfortunately, I anticipate the unified party gaining more ground in this contest.

Don’t get me wrong, if I could so much as afford a bus ticket I would be down there with the Wall Street protesters without a moment’s hesitation. But I know that I would be as angry at the crowd as I would be at the invisible enemy I’d be there to combat. It would be like college all over again, except the cause is far greater, so the lost opportunity is much worse. I’m sort of glad that I’m too poor to protest about how poor I am. I don’t want to be in that ambivalent position again. I’m sure that history would repeat itself exactly and one moment I’d be fantasizing about using his own black handkerchief to suffocate one of the anarchists who crashed a reasonable protest, and then the next I’d want to tear the furs off of the old lady berating us for our indigent, youthful naiveté, hold them up in front of her face and try to convince her that she’s a caricature of herself. Within a crowd of thousands, I would be as lonely as ever, pining as I have done before for a group that does not exist, which would disavow itself of poisonous or plainly irrelevant ideas, and yet engage its opponents intelligently and with self-respect.

My Comment on Egypt

I was talking to my mother on the phone the other day, and we took up casual discussion of the news. She brought up Egypt, and quickly came to the comment, “It’s amazing what that internet can do, isn’t it?”

I would have been content to pass the remark off as an instance of an older and relatively out-of-touch person ascribing almost magical qualities to a new technology that she’s just not familiar, but it seems like that sort of commentary has characterized a great deal of the media reporting on the topic. In light of that, I think it’s important to remember that the unrest in the Middle East didn’t start with a tweet – OMG you guyz, totes fed up with Mubarak, let’s march – it started with several people setting themselves on fucking fire.

Now that, my friends, is a breaking point. The decision that a social injustice has so impaired the sense of your life’s value that you are willing to die, and die in a terrifically awful way as a form of protest is an incredibly powerful thing. It makes the depth of the problem a people face so undeniably clear that they are spurned to massive action to honor that sacrifice. A facebook wall post does not really have the same impact. Internet communication is a terrific tool, but it’s just a tool. It’s not responsible for anything in and of itself. It is almost certainly the reason why the full course of these protests took months rather than years, but the speed of the communication does not reflect in any measure of the level of commitment of the protesters.

It is also worthwhile to remember that the Mubarak regime completely shut down the internet in response to the protests. The fact that they did not peter out as a result should make it vividly clear that the internet was not the thing driving the movement. That it continued on when it was no longer convenient to get in touch with people who weren’t in shouting distance goes to show that Egyptians were eager to organize on the ground and in the moment. And that is, after all, exactly what needs to be done, regardless of the level of involvement from Facebook and Twitter, if the strength of the movement comes from the presence of groups of real, live people in the physical streets.

It’s a peculiar Western tendency, but we seem to be enamored with the idea that great things can be achieved with a small amount of commitment from each of very large number of people. But if circumstances were dire and the people of America remained that lazy, I think they would find out that no matter how vast the communication network, if the people involved do not have a firm commitment, no real change is possible. We seem to like the idea that we can participate in revolutions by changing our backgrounds and using hash tags, but how many people in modern American society have really contributed something materially significant to an international movement? Plugging into what’s going on through our laptops and iPhones evidently feels participatory, but it’s not the same as being there and having to stick your neck out for the cause. Communication is not enough. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice something real, you aren’t about to accomplish anything. It makes sense, though, that we would have this sense that personal sacrifice and strength of commitment is not necessary. Even when it comes to war these days, we aren’t asked to so much as pay higher taxes, and some people seem to think that simply acknowledging that they’re happening, as with a bumper sticker, is a sufficient act of solidarity.

If we are ever to reach real breaking points, we have to realize that breaking points are not so easily reached.