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Years ago, I covered an anti-war march that lasted so long — wandering from Downtown to the South Side and back — that I was relieved when the police began breaking it up. At least one of those officers, though, was sorry to see it end.
“Aren’t you getting arrested?” he jeered as marchers dispersed and headed toward Grant Street. “Don’t you care about your values?”
That’s the question facing Occupy Pittsburgh, the economic-justice movement whose nearly two-month-long encampment on Mellon Green is facing eviction: How can you prove your cause is serious, in a culture that doesn’t take protest seriously?
Early on, Occupiers did so by staging or joining protests almost every day. Then, as the weather turned colder, they proved their determination just by hanging on, sleeping in flimsy tents. Now they are preparing to defy BNY Mellon, which owns Mellon Green, and is seeking a court order to remove them.
In a Dec. 9 notice posted outside the encampment, the bank maintained that it was motivated partly “by reported incidents of hypothermia and the use of propane heaters [and] gasoline powered generators.” But its motives, you’ll be shocked to learn, are not entirely humanitarian. In court papers, the bank cites fears of legal liability arising “as a result of conduct by or injury to” the Occupiers currently on its property.
Such fears aren’t totally groundless. There’s been a shoving match between Occupiers, and I’ve heard one report of an Occupier needing an ambulance after a slip-and-fall accident. But over nearly two months of Occupation, in other words, there’s been about as much discord as you might find on Mellon Green after a Penguins loss.
Still, it can be hard to see why the campers want to stay. The camp’s novelty has worn off for most Pittsburghers, and many protesters have already evicted themselves: Most of the tents clustered on the site have been empty for weeks. Inside the Occupy movement, tensions surfaced over race, gender and disputes over tactics.
In fact, it almost seemed like a relief when Mellon announced its intention to remove the camp. As the bank’s Dec. 11 eviction deadline came and went, Mellon Green became more festive than it had been in weeks. Supporters descended on the Green, disassembling unused tents, sweeping walkways, defiantly erecting a new military-style mess tent. Finally, the Occupiers had someone else to turn against, instead of each other
“BNY kind of shot itself in the foot, because it got people riled up,” Jess Kelly, one of the original Occupy organizers, told me. The camp had to remain, she added: “We’ve gotten people talking, but not to the point where they are getting actively involved.”
John McNulty, a trumpet-playing Occupy sympathizer who offered musical accompaniment for the day’s festivities, agreed. “If they can stick through the winter,” he said, “maybe people will pay attention to the message.”
Or not. Americans have a schizoid relationship with their own freedoms. We ridicule protesters for going too far, and for not going far enough … much like a cop heckling antiwar marchers, even as they obey orders to disperse.
We say we value the right to peacefully assemble, but become outraged if the crowd blocks an intersection. If the protesters own the same clothes and cell phones we do, we mock their hypocrisy for supporting corporations. If they wear nothing but homespun, we deride them as hippies.
In a society that jaded, protesters have few options for gaining our attention. Yes, defying Mellon’s eviction notice will likely mean arrest; cynics will then deride the Occupiers as anarchists. (Even though Pittsburgh’s Occupiers have yet to break a single window.) But that’s the thing about any act of civil disobedience: You’re damned if you do, ignored if you don’t.
Sometimes, it seems like what the Occupy movement is really protesting is … how hard it is to protest, and to make that protest heard. Burned by politicians who cater to economic elites, Occupiers profess allegiance to no party. Disappointed by lesser-of-two-evils compromise, they offer few policy prescriptions. They sometimes scorn the media, which often returns the favor.
That has left them with just one weapon: their own bodies, freezing in the night. And pretty soon, I suspect, the police will be coming for those.
This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2011.
Hey Potter,
I don’t know if you intended it this way, but that was a pretty nice eulogy for the Occupy movement. It’s annoyed me since its inception, but watching it wither has been somewhat bittersweet for me. And I wasn’t expecting that.
I would love it if we lived in a world where a multi-city American street protest conducted by well-intentioned people could solve income inequality, or get us all good jobs, or disentangle corporate money and politics. But we don’t.
We live in a world where every election has serious and far-reaching consequences, and where the opposition is organized, tenacious, and ruthless. Every discernible element of the Occupy movement’s extensive yet non-exhaustive list of grievances can be traced back to one electoral loss for the Democrats or another.
One of the Occupy movement’s biggest missteps was to direct all of its ire against mushy ideas (e.g., corporate greed) and symbols (and here I mean the banks) instead of against the people who have direct power to shape policy, elected representatives*. The tea party folks did not make that mistake. They went straight after Democrats and moderate Republicans in 2010 (remember the town hall meetings?), and they fucked some people up. As a result, Congressional Republicans can block any bill they want and they can extract huge concessions for letting even the most modest measure pass. They can stop Obama from appointing federal judges and relatively minor officials, and they can nullify major components of laws that are already in effect (see Richard Cordray’s appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). Meanwhile, state legislatures are redrawing legislative districts to their advantage and chipping away at voting, union, and reproductive rights.
People on the left need to realize that politics is serious business with real winners and losers, real heroes, and real villains. Instead of trying to raise $13,000 for the yurt fund so that it can go on ineffectually antagonizing a bank that will never give a shit, the Occupiers should invest their time and money where it will best serve their interests. Unfortunately, for the most part that means playing within the system that actually exists–donating to political campaigns, writing letters to representatives, working the phone banks, knocking on doors, and voting.
Protest does have its place. But the Occupy crowd should respect the rights they’re exercising by exercising them wisely and coherently. Tactics matter. Image matters. If the point is to bring about change, you need to win over some people who don’t already agree with you. The civil rights protesters understood that. Yeah, everyone dressed more formally back then, but people wore their Sunday best to the Woolworth’s counter and maintained a real sense of dignity, knowing the whole time that asshole bigots were going to accost them, throw shit at them, and maybe even crack their heads open for doing it.
More than anything else, the Occupy crew needs to stay strong when the protests fail to deliver. Politics is at once a short-term and long-term game. You have to play both to win.
*This is a half-assed analogy, but it’s like getting angry at a fugitive cheetah for eating all of the squirrel monkeys at the zoo. It’s a fucking cheetah, dude. That’s what it does. Don’t get mad at it. Get mad at the asshole zoo keeper who left the cheetah cage wide open.