It’s a moral issue. The best label I’ve found for my moral beliefs is “agnostic Mormonism” and I’ve recently been fond of calling myself a “liberaltarian” to describe my politics. Having grown up Mormon and having been a Mormon missionary for two years, my morality is informed heavily by Christ’s teachings. I love Jesus’s humanitarianism. It’s this humanitarianism that makes me sympathetic to the occupy movement, particularly after this past week.
On Thursday in Portland, Oregon, a 20 year old girl is pepper sprayed directly in the face from what looks like about two feet.
On Thursday in New York City, retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis is arrested. From a story preceding his arrest:
Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale “a farce.”
“They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lewis said.
Yesterday, UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike pepper sprays a group of students protesting on campus. Watch the video of this one.
The video is what pushed me over the edge. Seeing a man clad in boots and a helmet spray a group of students sitting on the ground (twice!) as if he were watering a garden, is too much for me. I’m an alum of the University of California. I can’t believe this happened in my country, in my state, at my university.
That the occupy movements lack definition is a feature, not a bug. Because occupy has no centralized leader or mission, everyone is allowed to project their own meaning onto it. I’ve seen occupy as a manifestation of anxiety over the influence of organizations in our lives. I believe it’s the same anxiety felt by people who identify with the Tea Party (which I found repulsive, probably based on my own classism).
Here’s what I see happening:
Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:
- Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
- Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, this week’s violence made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
- Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are literally forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.
Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they truly care for individual liberties, is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”
Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?
There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.
I don’t know what to do, but I will not give another dollar to the UC system until Lt. John Pike is fired and stripped of all severance pay. I will not donate to any elected official currently holding office or any major political party. I’ll have to think of some other things to do.
Wake up.
