On the occasion of the Mayday protests, below is an essay I wrote last Thanksgiving after spending some time with Occupy Wall Street. Be well!
Looking at the Occupy Wall Street protests outside your windows and across the country you might understandably be confused. What are they doing, the protestors? What do they want? If only they could clarify their goals then we could determine whether we’re for them or against them and put their stickers on our bumpers or their asses in our jails, if need be. If only they were more clear.
But the thing is, they’ve already made it crystal clear what they’re protesting for. It’s not for socialism or communism or wealth repatriation or whatever the popular term of the day is; it’s not for health care, or even for taxes on the rich or for jobs. The protestors want these things, certainly, but those are just manifestations of something deeper.
So what is that thing? What is this whole protest about?
In a word: decency.
Decency– the unspoken agreement to be fair and kind and just to our fellows — is the very thing that holds society together. And decency has been disappearing in our society. With our families, our friends and the other people we meet in the day-to-day, and in our relationships to the world itself, decency is being lost. This is what brings protestors out to the streets in snow and wind and rain.
Turn on Fox News and what is transfixing about it (or horrifying) is not the illuminating discussions of tax codes and job creation and constitutional law but the utter lack of decency. Hosts yell at guests, guests yell at hosts – and these are people who agree! It heralds a world utterly without decency, founded instead on rage.
What stays with you is not the logic of their arguments but their ferocity.
Rage is powerful. Rage is cleansing. Rage supersedes doubt and fear. Rage posits there is a right way and a wrong way, black and a white, my way and yours. And the world is so complicated — how wonderful to have it reduced to black and white! So immigrants have to leave or you’re an amnesty magnet. Taxes must be cut or you’re a socialist. You agree with everything I say or you hate America.
So cleansing in its simplicity, is rage, but it lacks all decency.
Now, the experts are saying that the protestors will lose their moment. That it will get cold and they’ll go home and the bankers will still be banking and the system gamers will still be have the system gamed. The protest will have lost.
This misses the crucial point: decency always loses. Always. Decency, in fact, only wins by losing. When decency meets rage in an alley, rage will beat it black and blue, and will then, if necessary, arrest it and explain why it had no choice in the matter. Decency against rage – it’s a no-contest.
So decency loses. It gets up. It loses again. It gets up. It loses again. And again. You get the picture. But at some point, something changes. Because decency doesn’t disappear. It can’t. Decency is innate in our being – rage is actually made of much flimsier stuff — it burns hot, it burns out. Decency remains. Having been a hospice worker, alone with people at their death, I can tell you that at the very end, decency is what remains.
So the protestors will get beat up. The beat-uppers will explain why. They will quote laws and permits and contracts. They will beat them up again. And then one day, you go to church and you hear a sermon on turning the other cheek. On how we should not attach to material things. Or you are alone with someone you love who is dying and her last words are not “Screw those hippies” but “The only thing that matters is love.” Or you glance at your fist after you’ve just connected with a cheekbone and there’s a cut and the guy you hit says, let me help you with that. Or you just stare out of a window during a break at work and see a sunset imbued with more colors than you thought one sunset could hold and you think: oh my, oh my, wait, really now did I think the sum total of my life was what I accomplished? What I owned? You do not know it, but exactly one month and four days from now you will slip on ice and a stranger will rush forward and save you from cracking your skull. You will have been saved then by decency, that one time. And that’s all it takes for the walls of the fortress of selfishness to begin to corrode. One moment, one act of decency, wherever it may spring from.
Decency always loses. Decency never does.
And I think this is something that you who oppose OWS miss. The protestors don’t want your wealth or your jobs. They don’t want even the universal health care and the mortgage help – I mean, of course they do, but that’s not why they’re standing in the street outside your window, day after day after day, singing songs to stay warm. And I think you actually know exactly what the protestors are after. And you know that that thing is inside you and ripe for the taking and that is why you fight so hard and would burn down the nation’s economy to warm your third home in the mountains. You can only fear what is separate from you but what if it has never actually been separate?
They want your decency. And sooner or later they will have it.
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