Crossroads for Occupy Wall Street

All social movements began as an effort to get peoples attention, to mobilize people to address some problem that has not been on the agenda of the powers that be.  Appealing to emotion and physical involvement are crucial in this stage.  Emotion is our motivator, without it we tend to do nothing, so marches, rallies, and other events where people of like mind can gather and emotionally connect are crucial.


But emotion is a beast that sometimes can be hard to corral.  Emotion is a real problem because when any of us has a emotional belief something is correct it is very difficult to change that belief through logic without something bad happening first to counteract the strong emotional link associated with the belief.  The Tea Party movement turned emotion loose a couple years ago and has made no attempt to rein in the emotion.  They rode emotion, reveled in it, celebrated inflammatory, accusatory speech, encouraged the view that those that were not with them were evil or diabolical.  The short term final result is still in doubt but it appears to me the Tea Party emotional indulgence has, for the longer term, pulled the Republican party into a groupthink trap that is moving them down the road toward electoral irrelevance.


The Civil Rights movement is a great example of a movement the corralled and controlled emotion.  It had leaders that recognized that though emotion gets the ball rolling, it is facts, logic and - perhaps most importantly - restraint - even in the face of provocation - that swings public opinion to the point where the movements goals become public opinion.


The anti-war movement of the Vietnam years never developed leaders with that level of intellectual sophistication.  In my estimation the anti-war movement of the 60's and early 70's was an abject failure.  Even though they had really valid points about the Viet-nam war, the movement never went beyond emotion.  They vilified those that disagreed with them.  They were so self-rightous they had no problem inconveniencing everybody else to indulge their desire to vent their anger.  The riot their confrontations sparked in Chicago in 1968 crippled the Democratic Party - handing the Presidency to the man they loathed, Richard Nixon.  In the end the war ended in 1975 more despite the anti-war movement than because of it.  The war had gone on so long the average voters realized it was crippling the economy, accomplishing nothing, and killing thousands of our young people.  I believe the anti-war movement, in the end, probably made the war last longer because for the decade the movement existed many voters focused more attention on the negative emotions they experienced from the movements self-indulgent tactics than on the facts that demonstrated the war was not a wise course of action.


I think Occupy Wall Street is at a crossroads.  A broad agreement that extends even into parts of the Republican party supports most of their basic points, but they do not seem to have developed the leadership that can channel their energy in positive and respectful directions.  The anarchy of the movements leadership is very much like the deliberate anarchy that the anti-war protests embraced so enthusiastically back in the 1960's.


I think Occupy Wall Street has done a marvelous job of piercing through the political slogans the politicians infatuated with wealthy people have used for years to prevent serious discussion of economic issues.  But when OWS shut down the Port of Oakland all I could think was "what purpose did that serve beyond gratifying their sense of power because they could do it?"  They deprived a lot of working folk of work, inconvenienced thousands of citizens of Oakland and the only thing the shut down accomplished that I can see was to gratify their sense of importance.   The image that pops into my head is a grown up version of a kid flopping around in the Supermarket aisle throwing a tantrum because Mom won't buy the sugar cereal the kid wants. 


They are in danger of terminal group think, they all hang around talking to each other all day and are becoming oblivious to the wider world.  Occupy Wall Street, if it developed some real leadership who understand the public relations value of restraint could turn this country around.  But if they degenerate into a self indulgent obstructionist movement, they could help the existing order survive for years longer than it otherwise would.