Dispatch From the First Two Days of Occupy Austin

I always find it disparaging to hear about people begging for jobs, high-paying or otherwise. There’s something deflating about realizing how alienated we’ve all become from the material world—enough so that we equate working under someone else’s direction for someone else’s ultimate profit with real livelihood, wealth, or liberty. Texas, after-all, is still creating jobs, as Rick Perry touted ad-nauseam before his debate stumble and recent slide in the polls. The thing he didn’t mention is that most of these jobs are minimum-wage, tedious, soul-crushing jobs with no health-care benefits. Are we really to put ourselves on the line for the right to clean toilets and move information around from spreadsheet to spreadsheet under artificial lighting for ten hours a day, only to come home too mentally and physically exhausted to do anything but eat microwaved dinners and slouch in front of the television until the veil of sleep covers us—only to wake up the next morning, still exhausted, to do it all over again?

With that in mind, I did not so much participate as watch and listen to the first two days of the Occupy Austin experiment in civil action / disobedience, where several people were demanding jobs, rights for workers, free health-care, and other things generally associated with the broad group now called “Leftists” (although there were enough “End the Fed” signs to make one hesitate before attempting to pin down any kind of ideological consensus). Still, despite the clichés—drum circles, signs with slogans, a call for shopping at farmers’ markets—and the confusing plea for more jobs, the beginnings of the solidarity occupation in front of City Hall offered cause for cautious optimism.

First, I think not having leaders or a cohesive “list of demands” (are they hostage-takers or just people assembling in a public place?) is a positive aspect of the group. From what I’ve heard in just a short time listening to people discuss under trees and on the sidewalks is a general malaise over politics itself; despite Paul Krugman’s insistence that the DNC still has one last chance, most people I’ve encountered seem disillusioned beyond the point of caring about Obama or any other career politician. Signs reading “oust the Republicrats,” and “The system is broken” attest to this attitude. Voting itself is being called into question, correctly.

Second, whether or not this activity develops or spawns anything else, it’s just nice to see people outside—not on cell phones and not bustling to this store or that, but sitting, talking, eating, playing music, cheering. While yesterday’s boisterous crowd had dwindled to a trickle by this morning (a lot of Austinites, I presume, have decided to stop by after work), the atmosphere was refreshingly positive. People were handing out flowers for free, offering others food and water, teaching each other chords on the guitar, and clapping loudly every time someone in a passing car or truck honked the horn. It’s just nice to see people giving a shit, isn’t it? And not people who are angry at other working people or grumpy about a Black president, people out only to protect their interests and their stuff, but people who are attempting to step outside their routines and see a bigger picture.

Some people have said that the occupations are the Left’s version of the Tea Party, which is hilariously mendacious because of course the Left, as we understand its modern incarnation, has been protesting in various forms for hundreds of years, from the Chicago 8 to Eugene V. Debs to the Students for a Democratic Society. If anything, what I’ve seen so far more resembles the SDS, or in the case of the people actually occupying Wall Street, the Paris general strike of May ’68 (one can dream, right?) than anything else. None of the signs reads “sous les paves la plague,” yet. Sure, all of them are there ostensibly for different and perhaps conflicting reasons (anarchists and Ron Paul libertarians, Greens and Jeffersonians, newly unemployed dissenters and people who have lived in poverty for generations), but as Chris Hedges said about the people he observed occupying Wall Street, “These are the only free people in New York.”

We can’t eat money. Jobs or no jobs, our nation and our culture are destroying our real livelihoods by destroying the material world on which we depend. Perhaps occupying public spaces is a far cry from any real solution, but at least it’s something, and we need everything we can get. Who knows how far people are willing to take this. For now, it’s just a delightful blip; a welcoming interruption to the apathetic routine. So far in Austin, it seems like one long outdoor party. But for all the initial criticisms, what’s wrong with that?