Shocker. The “General Strike” in Oakland leads to assorted vandalism, sporadic violence, a march to shut down the port of Oakland, and a whole lot of confusion. Not least of which is “what the very fuck is going on?”
Because the plot has been lost. Make no mistake, the whole point of the Occupy movement is now up for grabs. The International Longshore Workers Union is standing around debating whether or not they should be forcing their way into the port or honoring the strike, and believe me when I say that the Occupy kids want no part of crossing the ILWU, which has a long memory regarding another general strike. At the very least, the modern “movement” should be aware of why the ports on the West Coast still shut down every year on July 5. Hint: it’s not a paid holiday.
Marching, police activity, all we need now is the tired Buffalo Springfield soundtrack. Because this has been neatly forced into the same paradigm as every other mass action for the last forty years. This needed to happen in a very different way if people were going to be motivated. It needed to be somewhere far from the Bay Area, quite frankly, and it needed to involve people who will generate empathy in Peoria and Kansas City and Jasper and Trenton and Buffalo. The minute it’s possible for the mass media to shove this whole thing into the giant overstuffed box marked “HIPPIE SHIT,” the rest of the country – the legions of downwardly-mobile middle-class Americans done wrong by the financial shenanigans of the last decade – ceases to identify with the movement.
Maybe it’s not right, maybe it’s not fair, but it’s reality. Spare me the diatribes about “false consciousness”. I’m sure that goes down a treat in Boulder or Santa Cruz, but that’s not where this needs to resonate. Ed Earl Brown, who can’t find a job that pays what he used to get and whose wife is struggling to keep the kids fed and whose house is upside down 50% and who’s one bad month away from getting his base-model F-150 repossessed and whose biggest joy in life is going to be if LSU breaks through Saturday against Bama – if Ed Earl doesn’t identify with the Occupy movement, the then Occupy movement has blown it.
It might just be possible to salvage this shit, but it’s going to take some doing. Clean up. Dress like ordinary folks from Middle America. Tell the bedraggled potheads with the END CAPITALISM banner to fuck off back to the dorms. Focus – heavily – on the financial sector, the people who make billions on a glorified shell game, the ones who begged to be rescued by the Feds only to turn around and drop the hammer on ordinary people who needed the same thing. I’m mainly thinking here of Rick Santelli’s infamous CNBC raveout a month into the Obama administration, and thinking of Matthew 18: 23-34, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that once upon a time I was really fucking good at this shit.