Before it fell into irrelevancy, before the publicity-hounding stunts to close the nation’s ports and before it became a squatter’s camp for the disenchanted, the Occupy Wall Street movement offered important lessons in civic responsibility.
It’s a fact of modern life that we don’t really know how to demonstrate any more. Our crowds today are at the mall and in the sports stadium, not marching down the streets for justice and jobs.
Our crowds today have a price tag attached – the price of admission to the ballpark, the shopping bag that comes with a big sale. These are good things, but are they the only things?
The idea that people might collectively get together to simply exercise their right of assembly seems so, well, 20th, even 19th century.
We are losing our ability to be good democratic citizens, to speak truth to power, to face the fact of our growing economic inequality. Our country’s conditions are exactly those before the French Revolution – a few rich families and a whole lot of people struggling to make ends meet.
Snohomish County is luckier than most. We have Boeing to thank for the spate of jobs to keep this area relatively prosperous.
Underneath all the cheer is concern about what might happen in Europe’s economy. OWS didn’t have any answers for that. Such demonstrations rarely do, but they at least wanted to get out and say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” It’s not a particularly intellectual start, but it’s a start.
In Athens, Greece, there was a similar occupy movement, and at first it was kind of thrilling to see it happen. It was nonideological, just folks fed up with the political system that favored certain elite ruling families. I was there to see its popular assembly taking place nightly at 9. Sign up at 8:30 and anyone could speak for two or three minutes. It was direct democracy like that last seen in ancient Athens in 5th century BC/BCE.
It had its zanier moments. A druggie accused me of being a police informer. And eventually the police kicked everyone out of the downtown square as it fell into filth, just like happened in Seattle, New York and other cities.
People today remember the squalor but not the civic lesson in democratic participation. Shopping at the mall is great but we need to remind ourselves once in a while we are citizens too.
Dr. Taso G. Lagos runs a study-abroad program for a local university. Lagos was born and raised in Greece and moved to Snohomish County when he was 8. He currently lives in Edmonds.
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