Occupy Forever!

It’s weird to feel nostalgia about something that happened only a few weeks ago.

I’m not talking about looking back on a great meal, or recalling a terrific vacation, or even contemplating the memory of a distant teenage kiss.

I’m talking about a big event, something far bigger than you or me and everyone we know; so big it made the nightly news and splashed all over the Internet and our social media networks for weeks on end. And we were a part of it. But now it’s gone and it’s like . . . history.

But it was only a few weeks ago.

That feels weird.

Thursday evening I went to a photo exhibition at a local gallery -- really, little more than a live-in, street-level loft. Quite appropriate for the contents, actually, which were 140 photos of the people, places, and events of Occupy Portland.

The photographer, Mark Kronquist, says he shot 12,000 images over the course of Occupy Portland’s downtown sojourn between October 6 and November 15. He also collected some signs and other mementoes from the camp, and hopes to turn it all over to the Oregon Historical Society (OHS).

Hanging on the walls were shots of people I met in Occupy Portland—Raya Cooper, Adrian the finance committee gal with the bullhorn, several of the more wild-eyed folks who were fixtures at the site—as well as cops on horses, in riot gear, and in one case, caught in a startled embrace with a ragged protester. (Kronquist said the officer had pulled the man out of the path of a Max light-rail train and received a grateful hug in acknowledgement.)

I wasn’t the only one feeling nostalgic; the space quickly filled with graying elders and scruffy kids who clearly had spent time in the Occupy Portland camp. I even recognized the kid whose tussles over his “Everything is fine” signs I described in my “Democracy Is Messy” commentary a month ago.

Kronquist told me he had already given a disc with all 12,000 of his shots to the OHS, which might put together an exhibition about Occupy Portland for sometime next year. You see? Only two weeks to a month or so ago and it’s already history.

Since almost nothing the Occupy movement stood for or demanded in the way of change has been accomplished, that feels odd. And now that the movement has finally been pushed off the TV news reports and front pages by winter weather and the usual violence and sex crimes, I fear that the hope and the drive and the will to effect substantial change will wither away too.

That must not happen. It’s the job of the rest of us -- those of use who were on the sidelines and feeling a thrill about what the marchers and campers were doing -- to make sure that it doesn’t. In a way, they’ve handed the ball off to us. I’m sure they don’t feel they have; I suspect they’re working on future plans.

But I feel that the national Occupy movement, spearheaded as it was by discontented youth, was to some extent a slap and a rebuke to the rest of us as much as a call to arms. Their anger was partly a measure of how much we let this country slide in recent decades: We really weren’t doing our job as citizens.

We sucked on the glass tit (as Harlan Ellison labeled television so many years ago), grasped at each new electronic toy, ballooned on starch and sugar-fortified comestibles, and looked after ourselves . . . but not one another.

You can be sure the forces arrayed against us have not rested. In this week’s news stories, Bloomberg Marketplace News reported that the Federal Reserve handed out an astounding $7.77 trillion to the nation’s troubled banks (while they were telling everyone they were doing just fine), who made a tidy $13 billion in easy interest income (at the same time as they were refusing small business loans and foreclosing on Americans having trouble meeting their mortgage payments).

What is especially telling for me is that Bloomberg had to pry the facts out of the banks, who worked very hard to keep the details secret. That suggests they aren’t the least bit proud of what they did, whether it turns out to have been legal or not. As a Facebook acquaintance of mine, Gordon Romei, put it: “the very banks that took our taxpayer money, in fact begged for it, conveniently abandoned the basic tenets of capitalism by doing so. They *demanded* an outright Socialist rescue because they’d done so horribly in their field and were about to become unemployed like millions of their fellow Americans.”

Quite so.

We’re learning more and more about how hard the police and the corporations have been trying to spin the media coverage against the Occupy protesters and away from their own failings. Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote a wonderful piece about the brutal, pepper-spraying UC Davis police, who tried to claim that a menacing crowd of protesters had encircled the officers who had to defend themselves with pepper spray. Naomi Wolf has written an eloquent piece about why the crackdown on Occupy movement was so harsh and well-coordinated.

And Tina Dupuy, an editor for the Crooks and Liars blog, offered an eyewitness account of how LA city government and the police department hypocritically spun Occupy LA as a health and safety threat in order to justify shutting down the camp.

On the other hand, there have been signs of just how much genuine fear OWS has elicited in some quarters. Chris Moody of Yahoo! News describes the script the Republican Governors Association was fed to make Occupy look bad because, GOP strategist Frank Luntz said, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.” And, very heartening to me, most of the comments in response to Wednesday’s story in the Oregonian with the latest estimate of $85,000 to “clean up the damage” to the Chapman and Lownsdale squares are supportive of Occupy Portland and smelled longtime maintenance requirements padding up the figure.

Earlier in the day Thursday, before I went to the photo exhibit, I responded to a call from MoveOn.org to show up at the local office of one of my U.S. Senators, Ron Wyden, to speak out on jobs and other issues partly raised by the Occupy movement. It was a last-minute effort by the local MoveOn organizer, turnout was poor, and we were putty in the hands of the security officers who herded us through scanners and kept us cooling our heels until a young field representative named Oscar Arana came down to chaperone us up to the Senator’s offices. (Turns out the Senator wasn’t in town anyway.)

Mr. Arana listened politely to our comments, made some notes, and sent us on our way. It was a nearly worthless exercise, except that we got to meet one another -- a remarkably varied group -- and had a chance to express to each other our hopes and fears about what Occupy has aroused and stands to lose if we don’t keep pressing forward. It was a chance to meet, greet, and possibly start to get better organized for future action. Here I am with the lovely array of people who joined me in Senator Wyden's office to buttonhole Mr. Arana:

I’d like to think all the people who said -- in the comments sections of the local media’s Web sites, on Facebook, and elsewhere -- “I agree with the protesters on some of their points, but they’re going about it all wrong” are now going to show the protesters how it’s done . . . but I’m afraid most of them aren’t. I suspect that was mostly just an excuse.

I’m not going to lean on that excuse, and I hope at least some of the rest of you out there aren’t going to, either. In the weeks to come, I intend to write more here about what should be done, what I’m doing, and how things seem to be progressing elsewhere. And I intend to pester my Facebook friends about what they’re doing to move the country in a better direction.

Stay tuned.