One Year of Occupy Wall Street
This day marking the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall
Street started quite differently for me than did September 17, 2011. On this same day a year ago, the
Village Zendo held a Zazenkai (a full day of meditation practice) featuring a
dharma talk by Ryotan Sensei. So
last year I spent the 17th of September in an outwardly very quiet and law
abiding manner in a beautiful loft on Broadway, whereas this year I spent the
day in a very noisy, chaotic and supposedly lawless manner one mile south on
Broadway.
Today's festivities began early -- though not so very early
by Zen standards -- with the members of Occupy Faith convening at Liberty Plaza
at 6:45am. By coincidence, this
was the time of day my tyrannical Wall Street boss demanded I report to work as
a stock research analyst back in 1996.
But instead of sitting nervously in a cramped office as I did 16 years
ago wondering if I might be screamed at by my supervisor, today I was merely an
ex-Wall Streeter shuffling sleepily out of the Fulton Street subway station. I was there to swell the numbers of those
incurable malcontents who have a beef with the established order of things.
What is the established order of things? Gross inequality of social, educational
and economic opportunity (from which I have personally benefited); racism
(endemic in our culture and especially in our so-called criminal justice
system); a love of violence, weapons and war; corporate “personhood”
accompanied by endless corporate welfare and corporate-government cronyism; and
an unsustainable mode of living based on endless consumption, mountainous debt
and a torrent of waste. America
seems entirely divorced from the just, balanced and sustainable society
enshrined in its mythology and toward which we collectively seem unable to move
so much as an inch.
What responsibility do I bear, personally, for the mess we
find ourselves in? I’ll say that
my burden of responsibility for the dreadful state of things is above average, based
on the simple calculus that all the privileges enjoyed, all the success
derived, from a bad system serves as an indictment of the person who was
privileged and successful. Put
another way, those who profit most from dysfunction are most guilty for
dysfunction regardless of how innocuous their intentions or behavior might
actually be. Because I have derived
a fair amount of privilege and success during my lifetime from our increasingly
warped, dysfunctional society I am, in fact, the enemy. Thus, I went downtown today to march
against myself.
Does my protesting today “make up for” my past transgressions
against the responsible social order I now advocate? That is a question I am not competent to answer. Moreover, whether I am sitting in an
office waiting to be abused by a megalomaniacal boss, or meditating, or
sculpting a vase, or meekly protesting on the street, what is the ultimate difference? As the years roll on -- artificial and
meaningless demarcations to which we attach so much importance -- I understand
less and less how it all fits together.
Better still, I need less and less to find a way that it might all fit
together. I cannot make sense of
my life and feel no great urgency to do so.
Returning to the topic of today’s Occupy Wall Street
protests, what was the essence of those?
Was it the smaller numbers of protestors on the streets compared with
the peak of the movement back in October 2011? Was it the 125+ people who were arrested today for no reason
other than the established order’s reflexive reliance on arbitrary, overwhelming
police power to suppress people raising legitimate grievances in the public
square? Was it the barricades
surrounding every access point to Wall Street, or the one percenter with
outrageously bad posture declaring his sympathy with the 99 percent, or the
roving brass band carrying mock tombstones, or the tourists gaping quizzically
at crudely drawn signs decrying corporate greed, banksters and crooked politicians? Or was it the dog with the bandaged leg
I saw lazing on a sidewalk hours later in the West Village? It is no easier to make sense of my
impressions of Occupy Wall Street – to make things fit together there – than it
is to make sense of my own life.
As usual, the police did not cover themselves with glory
today. They offered a very
disproportionate response to the “threat” posed by the protesters and were
confused and heavy handed in their tactics. For example, while walking peacefully north on Broadway, the
Occupy Faith crew was suddenly ordered by the police to turn around and head
south. For reasons best known to
themselves, New York’s finest had drawn an invisible line in the street and
most of our group was not permitted to cross that line. But a few people in the front of our
group had already crossed the invisible line so abruptly drawn by the police,
and those few were summarily arrested -- arrested without any warning at all, simply
for walking down the sidewalk. Had
I been a mere 15 feet farther north at the time I would have been arrested as
well.
Then, those of us who had not been arbitrarily arrested were
loudly ordered by the cops to turn south.
We promptly obeyed and had not walked more than 20 feet south when we
were loudly ordered by another group of cops to turn north. So there we were, trapped, with dueling
groups of police telling us to walk both north and south. It seemed there was no way out of this dilemma
above ground, so we descended into a subway entrance and convened a meeting
underground. As we debated the
best way to deal with the police and avoid more arbitrary arrests, we were
ordered by yet another police officer to leave the subway so as to not block
pedestrian traffic.
When we emerged above ground, we were allowed to cross to
the west side of Broadway and then we regrouped on a small side street. After we had spent about 10 minutes in
this seemingly unobtrusive location, we attracted the attention of an entirely
different clutch of police who ordered us to disperse or be arrested for
blocking pedestrian traffic. Thus,
in a span of no more than 20 minutes a very small group of clergy and their
followers were ordered by police to move four times within a one-block
radius. The basis for all of these
orders was the urgent need to keep streets, sidewalks and subways free of
extraneous people.
The deep and abiding concern of Mayor Bloomberg and his
police about the free movement of pedestrian and vehicular traffic in New York
City is truly a wonder for the ages.
If our municipal authorities were half as worried about protecting our
petty constitutional rights (such as the equal protection clause, freedom of
assembly and freedom of speech) as they are about protecting traffic, New York
City would be a beacon of liberty and justice unto the world. But alas, our plutocratic mayor tears
the constitution to shreds on the thinnest of pretexts and with zero
accountability.
While our experiences with the authorities today were not at
all comforting, it was good to know that our presence downtown was a serious
thorn in their sides and a real wake up call to anyone who thinks our current
system is fair or acceptable. It was
good to taste the confusion, anger, humor and creativity that the protesters brought
to our lively day in the street. It
was good to taste my own confusion and culpability vis-à-vis the system. Most of all, it was good yet again to
Occupy Wall Street.
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