Occupy Wall Street and the Redistribution of Anxiety

Occupy Wall Street is about anxiety, and the courage of young people to fly into conflict on Gandhi’s wings. This is the noble legacy of civil disobedience on display at Zuccotti Park. We are seeing that anxiety channeled by courage can transform a society.

What does anxiety look like? You can see this drama played out as the demonstrators meditate surrounded by police whose anxiety is palpable, perhaps because the police cannot figure out which side they should really be on. You see it and hear it and feel it from all of the media pundits who are trying to “figure out,” discredit, or dismiss OWS. You see it in the angry denunciations emanating from Wall Street financiers who beat their breasts and cling to the image of their legitimacy because they work so hard that they deserve their top 0.1% style mega incomes. (Doctors and tool and die makers work long and hard too, but their skill and hard work and education, often far beyond that of a financier, do not produce 7 and 8 figure incomes). You feel it in the desperate rhetoric of George Will, as he tries to discredit Elisabeth Warren’s assertion of the obvious, namely that the very successful are highly dependent on society and did not create their wealth and achievements in a vacuum. You sense it in the desperate smearing by David Brooks, whose efforts to behead this movement lie in planting the seeds that this protest is about anti Semitism rather than an unjust society.

Change, we are all finding, is very stressful. Even inevitable and healthy change.

We have reached a turning point. The “heads I win, tails you lose” game is over.

(Source: alternet.org)