Kalle Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver, BC. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti Park situation in lower Manhattan, it was Lasn: he had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest---Occupy Wall Street.
Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided and Lasn was thinking that this might be a good thing. He decided that the apparent end of Zuccotti was not a tragedy but the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities, what he calls "revolutionary moments" akin to the slapping of a Tunisian fruit vender. "I just can't believe how stupid Bloomberg can be! This means escalation. A raising of the stakes. It's one step closer to, you know, a revolution."
To many in the park, vagueness was a virtue. It also had a history. In 1962, student radicals gathered in Michigan to complete the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. One student argued that an early working draft was too utopian and impractical. But Tom Hayden, the main author, wrote that the movement should "remain ambiguous in direction for a while; don't kill it by immediately imposing formulas.... When consciousness is at its proper stage, we might talk seriously and in an action-oriented way about solutions."
Events in New York seemed to bear out Lasn's hunch that the temporary eviction of the protesters from Zuccotti Park was an opportunity rather than a defeat. The organizers were quickly able to regroup and agree that they should return to the park. Recently, the movement mounted one of its largest protests to date in attempting to shut down the New York Stock Exchange and organized a sit-in at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. More than two hundred people were arrested. Similar Day of Action protests temporarily blocked bridges in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Portland and Philadelphia.
As demonstrations took to the streets across the country to decry the excesses of Wall Street, a reporter asked President Barack Obama what he thought of them. Obama allowed that he understood their anger and even offered a bit of carefully modulated praise. Even before the protests started on September 17, the Administration had begun to move in that direction with a $447 billion job creation plan, to be funded by a tax on the rich.
"The protesters are giving voice to a broad-based frustration about how our financial system works," the President said at an October 6 press conference. His kind words for Occupy Wall Street were a sign of the four-week-old grassroots leadership movement's success.
Warning! Social might is now moving toward your community, state, nation, as well as global corporations. We have entered the age of empowered individuals, who use potent new technologies and harness social media to organize themselves. Most are ordinary people with new tools to force you to listen to what they care about and to demand respect. The institutions of modern developed societies, whether governments or companies, are not prepared for this social power.
No matter what happens next, the movement's center is likely to shift from NYC and form somewhere else, around some other circle of people, ideas and plans. "This could be the greatest thing that I work on in my life." Justine Tunney, of www.OccupyWallSt.org, said. "But the movement will have other Web sites. Over the coming weeks and months, as other occupations become more prominent, ours will slowly become irrelevant."
Source: The NewYorker, November 28, 2011 and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, October 17, 2011