Rev. Dr. Anand Veeraraj
As I write this, Time magazine announced “The Protester” as the 2011 Person of the Year. The year 2011 will go down as one of the seminal moments in modern history. Ordinary people all over the world rose up to protest and express their frustration against the failures of corrupt leadership and incompetent institutions. All these protesters share a common belief that their countries’ political and economic systems are unjust and merely serve the interests of the rich and powerful.
Almost all protests began as spontaneous local unrests, independent of the established political parties in power or opposed to them. The vanguards of these movements are largely made up of internet savvy young, educated and middle class people. The leadership has largely come from the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. The year 2011 saw the rise of the Arab Spring sweeping across the Islamic world. No one imagined that the self-immolation of a poor Tunisian fruit vendor would bring down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and rattle regimes in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Without foreign intervention, the Arab Spring brought down brutal dictatorships and ushered in freedom, democracy and change of existing political and economic systems. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) — a grassroots movement alternatively called the “American Spring” — got started in downtown Manhattan inspired by the Arab Spring. In fact, the Egyptian protestors at Tahrir Square tweeted their support to OWS protestors in Zuccotti Park protesting against the excesses of Wall Street and its corporate greed.
The term OCCUPY WALLSTREET was coined by Kalle Lasn, a Canadian activist who founded Adbusters, a magazine that believes in the power of the media to subvert traditional values and corporate power. What Lasn found among his readers was an unresolved untapped rage, an internal monolog that needed expression. For so long the voices of the young, of students and of working class people had remained dormant looking for a Tahrir moment. That moment arrived when OWS protestors found the spark in the Arab Spring. Adbusters magazine called for a small protest to be held on Wall Street on September 17 th , 2011 with a poster on Twitter with a hash-tag slogan: OCCUPY WALLSTREET.
To go along with the ad, Adbusters’ team ran a full-page photo-illustration showing a barefoot ballerina dancing atop of the charging bull statue in front of Wall Street while gas-masked insurgents are seen fleeing in a teargas fog in the background.
The message was stunningly clear and persuasive. On September 17 th , 2011 a couple of thousand people showed up at the Zuccotti Park, a hundred slept overnight, and the occupation was on. Before they knew it, the protest took on a life of its own. Until recently, most New Yorkers had never heard of Zuccotti Park. It is a privately owned public place near the World Trade Center site. OWS struck a chord and the demonstrations have since spread to other part of the country, to many cities and towns. Unions, students, media, rights and religious groups joined in to give OWS enhanced visibility and clout.
David Graeber, a scholar with anarchistic inclinations and his associate Georgia Sagri played a key role in encouraging OWS protestors to set up a long-term tent village in the park. It was meant to be a critique of the U.S. political system that has been corrupted by Wall Street money. Graeber coined the nifty slogan, “We are the 99%.” The protestors bellowed that they are the 99% who are against the greed and corruption of the 1% who hijacked the economy of this country with the help of Wall Street. OWS adopts revolutionary tactics of nonviolent peaceful means to achieve its goals and purposefully refrains from making any demands for specific legislative or executive actions.
As the movement continues to evolve, protestors have employed a myriad of tactics to get their populist message across. Various kinds of occupying strategies have been advanced. Starting with Zuccotti Park, many public parks and town squares all across the U.S. have been occupied by protestors, some with long-term tent-encampments. There were also Occupy Friday — a boycott of big retailers like Target, Sears and Macy’s on Black Friday, Occupy Foreclosed Homes, Occupy Banks, Occupy West Coast Ports, Occupy Capitol Hill, Occupy Campuses etc. More of these kinds of protests are planned for the future. Cash contributions pour in; people of all ages volunteer their time and talents. All decisions are made collectively and voted in General Assemblies. Although a core group of activists keeps the momentum going, for the most part OWS is a leaderless grassroots movement, ideologically unhinged and organizationally naïve.
Today’s youth and students in America need a voice; they are scared to death about their future. For most young people the prospect of starting a family and raising children is a scary thought. Young people think that they face a “black hole future.” They look at a planet with climate change that will be much hotter when they get older. They see the U.S., the most powerful nation on earth, in decline. They see the folly of the U.S. perpetuating dumb wars and conflicts around the world, bankrupting the economy, while the political parties in Washington squabble and fail to make hard choices. Obama, with all his rhetoric of change and hope is impotent to solve the crisis, because his reelection is largely influenced by the massive campaign contributions he receives from Wall Street and its affiliates. Our democracy exists solely for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Young people and the middle class therefore look for a compelling alternate narrative, a new political and economic climate that will alter the balance of power. It can come about only with massive networks of grass-root movements. If young people don’t rise up and fight, they may have no future to look for.
As we reflect on the events of 2011, we are caught up in the revels of yet another season of Christmas. Will the hopes and promises of Nativity bypass or inspire us again? I wonder if there are any morals to the Nativity narratives that apply to the OWS and the Arab Spring phenomena. Indeed, the hopes and promises of the Nativity are hidden in the mysteries and memes of its narratives. These memes raise fundamental questions of justice and fairness. Nevertheless, we gloss over them with our questionable social consciences and instead allow ourselves to be swept up by the superficial magic of this year-end festival.
The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist, an incorrigible atheist. He employed the word to imply a kind of opaque transcendent cultural messages which genes transmit from one to the other. It is analogous to the genes that self- replicate, mutate and respond to the pressures impinged on them by the environment in which they propagate. Webster’s dictionary defines meme as “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Memes tend to distort realities with coded messages and symbols and seek to reshuffle established social realities and cultural values. Ultimately, memes contribute to the transformation of organisms and their societies. Whoever thought that the birth of a baby born to an unwed destitute couple in a remote hamlet in Judea would strike terror among the elite and the powerful in Jerusalem? And indeed those memes of Nativity went on to give rise to revolutionary faiths and many transforming movements all around the globe. On the night of the Nativity, the petrified shepherds in Bethlehem heard the heavenly choir sing, “Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace and goodwill toward all people” [Luke 2:14]. Mary’s Magnificat presents these memes not as a clever conspiracy, but as a radical manifesto of the divine narratives of creative transformation to be bellowed from the rooftops.
[T]he Mighty One has done great things for me — holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones; but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things; but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his
descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors. [Luke 1: 49-55].
Today, the memes of the Nativity are invoked and rehashed, not only in the United States, but all across the world. These protest movements play out the memes implicit in the Nativity narratives that happened 2000 years ago. If there is one meme unites both Nativity and OWS, it is the word “occupy.” The word is beginning to acquire ideological and theologicalmeanings. While the protestors in Zuccotti park and elsewhere seek to occupy public spaces andcenters of power and influence, the central message of the Nativity is about a young destitute couple looking to occupy a secure space to give birth to a life giving force. Denied a room in the inn, they were forced to give birth to their first born in a manger and wrapped the new born with swaddling clothes. “Occupy,” they did; and they did it against all odds!
The question all of us ask is this. “Does OWS have a Magnificat?” Americans have always believed in the fairness of their political and economic system. But the recent economic meltdown, housing foreclosures and waging of unethical wars have taken away our confidence in the fairness of our government. Simply put, OWS is arrayed against a Wall Street that scaffolds corporate-driven top-down social, economic and political structures that merely caters to the corporate greed of the rich and powerful. Wall Street has come to stand for the 1% who own and control much of the wealth of this country at the expense of the 99%, many of whom are workers without jobs, parents on food stamps, students with huge loans and families ejected from their foreclosed homes. Our economy has turned sour; it is unfair and unsustainable for a growing number of people, especially for the middle class. The disparity in income distribution has been steadily growing for the past few decades making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The protestors envision a world which would be a bottom-up kind of place rather than the top-down society we have come to accept as the norm of modern civilization. The OWS movement challenges the standard narrative of the traditional capitalistic worldview of big corporation promoted by politicians and media organizations. There needs to be a regime change. OWS seeks to dismantle the corporate-driven state and reinvent American democracy from the ground-up.
As the winter sets in, OWS hopes to re-group and channel its growing influence and passions constructively. Will the protests grow and become relevant or will it be swept away into the dust-heaps of history? Eerily, OWS has remained a secular movement although progressive left-leaning religious groups have embraced its goals and tactics. Nevertheless, if OWS is to beeffective and universal, it has to become a spiritual force. It should move on to add another item to its list of occupations. It must come to occupy our religious centers of power. At the moment, OWS has stayed away from religious establishments and left them unscathed. Many of our religious institutions and their leaders are just as corrupt as the politicians in Washington. Much of the violence and oppression around the world are perpetrated in the name of god and religion.
The memes of the Nativity rattled the religious functionaries in Jerusalem. The temple priests and the scribes were in collusion with the corrupt powers of Rome. Together they sought to annihilate the Prince of Peace; but God, who is above all human conniving and plotting, made a way for the Prince of Peace to escape into Egypt.
The word “occupy” has emerged an important word of the 2011 lexicon. If it is to have a universal relevance, it must acquire theological meanings and seek ideological narratives to ground its meanings. Advent season is an opportune time to infuse the word with new theological meanings. “Occupy” is one of the profound and intriguing memes of Nativity.
Ultimately, Nativity was about “occupying” — occupying a manger which became the center of power to proclaim the message of justice and peace to all people. “Occupy,” we must, and take back what rightfully belong to all of us, our economies, our political systems and our religious institutions.
May the joy and peace of Christ child be with you during the season of Christmas and lead you forward into 2012.
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