During an Occupy Amherst demonstration on the University of Massachusetts campus last week, two things were notably different from nationwide iterations of the general Occupy event.
First was an isolated cry from a non-Latin American about ending injustice from capitalism in Latin America during the “Simon-says” speeches; most rhetoric heretofore has focused on the United States. Second was an isolated person in the corner of the protest with a bandana-covered face hallmark of protestors on matters Middle Eastern and lofted an ambiguous sign that read, in paraphrase, “American Faggots.” The Occupy Amherst people, especially those of the LGBT community, did not confront the person but nonetheless verbally lacerated the person’s undistinguished vernacular to passers-by, even the uninterested. “Ignore him. I think it’s a him. Anyways, he isn’t one of us.”
Media coverage abound has proposed Occupy protestors to be unfocused and unorganized. Mostly, this is untrue.
But protestors have made their circles permeable to support and in result, just as inside a permeable stem cell may enter unfavorable genetic codes that corrupts development, unfavorable characters and their extreme, archaic or plain nonsensical ideas may enter the protest and de-purify its ambition.
The focus of a protest depends on the purity of its rhetoric which in turn is defined by the politics of its members. The Occupy event, from what I have seen personally in Amherst and New York, and elsewhere through media, is focused in its rhetoric but unfocused in its emotion.
Anger is a common characteristic among most protestors but where the anger comes from diverges. Some are angry at the government, others are angry at private finance, a few at the voices in their head; yet, most seem possessed by a vague but passionate anger at the entire world for some perceived injustice somewhere on the continuum of their life.
It is a dangerous thing.
Someone who isn’t one of them but possessing their general anger can thus enter, and in the process, defining the protest, indeed defining the world, tends towards impossible. And what becomes of things impossible is infinite nothing.
I heard of this phenomenon once before, while living in Latin America.
At Ecuador’s bureau of economic development there was a local young economist. Call him Juan Carlos. Like most young graduates Juan Carlos was endowed with moderate talent and had built for himself a directionless ambition. But his echelon career path involved becoming a research economist for a Wall Street investment firm. He had once been to New York and stood outside the bronze bull on Wall Street and waved his coat like a bullfighter’s muleta for pictures and he wanted now to not be simply a tourist in the city, which he regarded as the world. In Quito, he dated a girl from New York studying abroad and talked as much about the bull in New York as the bullfights in the festival of Quito where he drank beer and ate empanadas de viento.
Yet, there was no convergence of the two worlds, just as there is no chance an anti-bullfighting protestor will see beauty in a bullfight. There was no going to New York without a visa and she was not staying without one. Even in his politics he was in free-fall. Though he sympathized with the rebels of the Spanish Civil War who believed in the group over the individual, he also sympathized with the butterfly pinned into an observation box. He, like others, and perhaps the protestors in Amherst and their compatriots elsewhere, wanted the impossible mathematics of two worlds for a new one. In such a case, one has the nightmare of the violinist. Arriving to first chair to lead the orchestra, he picks up his instrument, only to find that he is holding a guitar. No wonder one becomes angry at the world.
The bureau was responsible for creating a comprehensive country development plan and monitoring it. Carlos had the responsibility of evaluating whether education subsidies were working. Though most lucrative for his age, the job did not pay enough for his hopeful MBA, so to supplement, he sold black-market mobile phones from his desk. Depending on who came to see him, his boss, a socialist economist educated in Beglium, or a client, he was careful which drawer to open. On the day his girlfriend left for home he accidentally opened the wrong one.
“What is this?” his boss said. He blew his explanation, and the boss warned, ushering him into a scheduled meeting, “For your life, you had better hope one of those phones can call God. Or better yet, the President.”
When everyone was seated in the conference room the boss stood at the window and said, “Listen to that. On the street is a huge indigenous march protesting the government for unfair economic conditions. We are with them. We are against the Washington Consensus.” And she began writing a series of equations on the window in red. It was a model seen in past Latin American revolutions gone wayside. One equation for demand. One for supply. One for government. One for the bull. One for the bullfighter. And one for the Holy Ghost.
The boss turned to the studious and eager group of young economists and said to them of what he wrote, “This will be our life’s work. We will make this a better world. A new world.”
Everyone but Juan Carlos took notes. He stared through the window and through the equations and above the ridge of the Andes that frame Quito at a plane going in an upward angle to the faraway.
Protestors and counterparts live in their own worlds in doubt of one other. But, as is often ignored, these worlds are the same. The surest proof is that there is always someone trying to escape.
Lawrence De Geest is a guest columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
