Kalle Lasn on the Spirit of Occupy

The issue that helped spark Occupy Wall Street

Just as Adbusters' worldwide circulation climbed beyond 100,000 and our NGO was becoming a geopolitical force to be reckoned with, a strange thing happened. I became disillusioned. Or rather, I became profoundly disappointed with politics on the Left. I felt that we had lost our way.

We Lefties just weren't . . . making things happen. A protest could draw a million people, but then everyone went home and resumed their routines. Internet campaigns whipped up great anticipation, but a week later you hardly even remembered what they were about.

We whined a lot. Read many books. Knew what was wrong with the world but had no idea how to fix it.

When did we start taking ourselves so seriously? Where did the "people's laughter" go? Weren't we the ones who knew how to live, love, think and have fun? And, you know . . . care? About the big stuff?

I saw my compadres fighting smaller and smaller battles. Gorging on critical theory. Eager to cancel anyone who disagreed. A sort of self-purification program seemed to be happening — an "I can hang my head lower than you" one-upmanship of gooey liberal guilt that was frankly embarrassing.

The Left suddenly just wasn't cool anymore.

And that's not trivial. Because when you lose your cool you lose your influence. Cool's sneaky superpower is its ability to propagate, to replicate in a critical mass of human minds. Lose that and you've lost the game. After 50 years of identifying as a Lefty, I realized I couldn't in good conscience wear that label anymore.

And then, at the peak of my disillusionment, as often happens in life, the story took a new twist.

In Tunisia, young people rose up and kicked corrupt President Ben Ali out of power. In Tahir Square people kept pulsating until long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak fell. The Arab Spring spread quickly through the whole Middle East. It was exhilarating. In our brainstorms at Adbusters, we kept asking ourselves: Why can't we do something like this? Why not . . . an American Spring?

In our strategy sessions we kept obsessing over the coke-sniffing high-flyers of Wall Street who brought on the crash of 2008. Then came the idea of marching into the iconic heart of global capitalism and occupying it. That's when we all got truly excited.

We chose September 17 as the kickoff date because that was my mother's birthday. For me, it was personal.

My mother, Leida Lasn, was the soul of the image we chose: a ballerina on a bull. Serenity in chaos. Like a Basho poem read on the floor of a stock exchange, or welders at Toyota laying down their torches and praying to the fire gods.

We started pumping out tactical briefings. The first one read:

We collaborated with activists in New York. David Graeber and local community organizers mustered. And on September 17 it happened: a peaceful battalion of a few thousand marched from their base camp in Zuccotti Park to the statue of the charging bull in the heart of the financial district.

Support started flying in across a ridiculously wide spectrum — from the Anonymous collective to Michael Moore to Elizabeth Warren and even Barack Obama. Electric speeches from the philosopher Slavoz Žižek to political analyst Naomi Klein to actress Susan Sarandon kept occupiers' spirits high.

It was leaderless, joyous and intense.

The energy built, fanned unwittingly by Mayor Bloomberg's tone-deaf pushback and a NYPD beat cop caught on camera viciously pepper spraying a couple of teenage girls. On October 3, more than 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And it spun out. Occupations popped up in Chicago, LA, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, Washington. The spark jumped borders: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Then oceans: London, Paris, Madrid. Sydney. Jakarta. Bangalore. By October, there were occupations in more than 2000 cities around the world.

This was more than a protest against greedy bankers and the shenanigans of the global financial system. It was a great howl from the soul from a whole generation that said: We are the 99% and we're sick of you 1% lording it over us.

It felt uncannily similar to what happened in 1968 when a student uprising in the Latin Quarter of Paris spread like wildfire, across borders, over oceans. For a few heady weeks in 1968 and again in 2011, a tantalizing question hung in the air: Could this be the beginning of a world revolution?

Looking back, what killed the momentum in both 1968 and 2011 wasn't that people failed to put their asses on the line. They did. But we failed to deliver what every revolution needs: one big issue to galvanize around. We didn't have our memes figured out. We had the attention of the world but couldn't muster much beyond a few cryptic pronouncements. We kept shouting, "We are the 99%!" But when winter crept in and Mayor Bloomberg ambushed Zuccotti Park in the wee hours of the morning, we lost our momentum and will to fight back.

OWS fizzled out, went down with a whimper. At least that's what people say.

But I don't quite see it that way.

Those three months in 2011 reinvigorated the Left and stoked a worldwide social movement whose consequences are still working themselves out today. You can trace a direct line from #OWS to the rise of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and many of the protest and liberation movements now springing up around the world. Occupy Wall Street politicized a whole generation of young people, just like my generation got politicized back in 1968.

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What Now?

Life is much more precarious today than it was fourteen years ago. Young people can't find jobs, can't pay the rent, can't see a way out of this pileup of existential crises we face. Wall Street is greedier than ever. Brutal wars rage. World leaders have abandoned all hope of fixing the climate crisis. And wherever you look, climate-denying fascists are running away with the ball.

Now more than ever we need another Big Bang moment like 1968 and 2011. But is the revolutionary spark still there? Have too many of us stopped believing? Has life ground us down? Are we too exhausted and broke?

I don't think so. Our spirit of resistance may be dormant, but it's still there deep inside us. It just needs a compelling reason to spring back to life.

A couple of things need to happen now.

First we must answer the question we never answered 15 years ago: "What Is Our One Demand?" We'll keep thrashing around in the weeds until we figure that out.

This won't be easy. It's going to take some serious soul-searching. We'll have to hunker down . . . congregate in thousands of little groups around the country and brainstorm our hearts out. Zero in on a new grand narrative, a radical set of big ideas — metamemes — ideas so profound and fundamental that a sane and sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

And then, we'll have to come up with a whole new paradigm of protest.

The hundreds of one-off demonstrations that have flared up around the country since Trump got elected are just quick reactive jabs, born of frustration. We're just gushing out anger at the guy. When will we wake up and realize that traditional one-offs like No Kings don't add up to a hill of beans? To start winning again, we have to pick up the pace, the rhythm, the tempo of our resistance. And, most importantly, face this fact: Words without deep personal commitment behind them have the shelf life of lettuce. To pull out of this death spiral we must, each of us, change the way we live.

For centuries we've followed the same routine — the playbook of the industrial revolution: we've worked weekdays, partied on Saturday, rested (sometimes) on Sunday. Toiling, and then escaping from the week's toil. Five-sevenths of our lives spent punching a clock. That leaves no time for growth, for transformation, for dreaming.

So we steal some. One day a week. Friday. We just take Friday back. Make it ours. Repurpose it. Rededicate it to the service of the wild human spirit and a sustainable future. Turn it into a new kind of 21st century holiday: A global day of action.

From now on, think of Friday as a call to personal revolution.

Instead of working, we start the day by staring into the mirror, building resistance in the circuitry of the heart. And then, armed with our metamemes, we hit the streets to sow inspired anarchic bliss.

We turn our cities into carnivals, our universities into hotbeds of revolutionary fervor, our supermarkets into staging grounds, our financial districts into fiery zones of contention. We churn everything up!

Some of us will write poems and shoot them into cyberspace. Others will wander around détourning ads, posting ultimatums and manifestos on lampposts, singing in Starbucks, taking our dogs into Cartier stores, strolling into Safeway and folding a banana. Each of us, each in our own sweet way, will find our mojo . . . dedicate our Fridays to winning the planetary endgame — match the dark insanity of the present moment with a crazy exuberance that is ultimately full of light and hope.

Oh yeah, baby. It's time to be reborn.

For the wild, KL