In November of last year I vented my spleen at the Occupy movement, then festering in the midst of their noxious Oakland and San Francisco camps. As regards Oakland, I wrote:
While the Occupy movement is doing nothing positive except to provide overtime to TV reporters, it is causing significant harm to the very people it professes to defend, i.e., the “99%”. Because when all is said and done, Oakland has been required to absorb a serious financial blow that it can barely afford. Oakland’s downtown teeters on the edge of becoming a no-man’s-land slum, but a slight uptick in retail was pointing to some (wan) hope. Then the Occupy folks came along; now those businesses may be facing bankruptcy due to lost revenue. Oakland can’t afford the million-plus dollars it has been obliged to spend already. And where does all that money come from? Not from the 1%. Nope. It comes from the tax base, i.e., the rest of us.
Overall I saw the Occupy movement as little more than a fad, something my Dad derided as “going to see the dogfight.” For a while there, it was either the cool thing to do (if you were an idealistic young person) or a convenient mooch (if you were a druggie wino homeless bum.) Whatever idealism had fueled the movement in the first place had given way to filth, disease, crime, and endless squabbling. The encampments were public nuisances and the message, if there had ever been all that much of one to begin with, was lost in an ever-widening sense of disgust with what had turned out to be self-indulgent, adolescent impatience. A recent article in the New York Times agrees with me, the author all but confessing that last year’s enthusiastic media coverage partook of the emperor’s new clothes, as individual writers who knew perfectly well what a trifle it was avoided saying so given the media’s overall positive slant.
My little blog post mattered little in the scheme of things, but I did receive some feedback, all of it respectful and all of it thoughtful. There were those who thought that Occupy would become something bigger, more important. It didn’t; in fact, it dwindled away to nothing, save unnecessarily snarled traffic last night as knots of protesters made a wan attempt at recapturing some of the pointless irritation of yore. But it was mostly very little ado about nothing. Some magnificent intellectual scrawled chalk slogans on the bricks of the public plaza at Castro and Market. Protest this, protest that, protest some other damn thing, was the ultimate message of those slogans. Whatchever it is, I’s agin it, said the slogans. That was the problem with the Occupy movement from the beginning; they had no clear mandate, no real purpose, no actual message. They offered only a noisy but incoherent cacophony of conflicting and contradictory messages. They wanted this. They didn’t want that. Others wanted that and didn’t want this. Others were just there for a good time. Others were mooching. Others were stealing from the partiers and the moochers and the ones who did or didn’t want this or that.
I ended my November rant with a sneer:
So to the Occupy folks: go ahead, sit there. Camp. March. Bang on drums. I only hope that you don’t all become victims of typhoid or tuberculosis or other such old-timey scourges that inevitably follow such encampments in time. Or, if you do drop dead of some nasty infectious disease, let us hope that the authorities had limited the epidemic to just your messy little camps, so the rest of us aren’t obliged to recapitulate the pleasures of the 14th century thanks to your adolescent posturing.
At least they didn’t spread some vile epidemic to the rest of us. The camps are gone, although probably a few holdouts remain hither and yon, rather like those Japanese soldiers who remained ensconsed in their Polynesian island dugouts throughout the 1950s, convinced that they still had a holy duty to good old Emperor Hirohito. The one-year Occupy anniversary was marked with a few sodden protests and a smattering of sourly resentful articles in the mainstream press. And let that be an end to it, the fad that masqueraded as a cause. It gave us a catchphrase: 99%. Maybe it brought about a reaction against unreasonable ATM fees. But that was hardly worth it. The rest—Wall Street greed, financial malfeasance, income inequality—were visible and important issues before Occupy and remain visible and important afterwards. All in all, it was the 2011 edition of hula-hoops, pet rocks, and break dancing. Just dirtier. And a lot more expensive.