Note: One of the best explanations of the OCCUPY movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc-k6dhgs&feature=youtu.be.
At the same time university students in California were getting pepper-sprayed for sitting in an inconvenient place, the students whose papers I’m grading as part of my job were arguing, sometimes in all-caps and with triple exclamation points (the equivalent of applying a fine layer of pepper-spray to my feelers?), that if one doesn’t like America, one should pack up his or her communist propaganda and GET OUT.
The instructor had asked students to describe how their cultures inform their perspectives. Most of them identified as American, and quite a few wrote as though being an American meant one thing only – the type of thing outlined in the above paragraph.
Few of the essays were so aggressive.
Perhaps most distressing to me is that fact that I haven’t written fiction in days.
My brain is occupied.
I find various events around the world upsetting on a regular basis, but since I’ve been in a Creative Writing MFA program, I’ve made an effort to stay away from the news because I find it troubling to the point that it rules my thoughts and makes me feel helpless and angry – point being, I can’t work. Like now. I have yet to discover how to compartmentalize these feelings, and so I avoid them as much as I can. It’s cowardly, and it’s absolutely key to my productivity. I think everybody has to do this to some extent. Except maybe sociopaths, who revel in violence and tragedy on a grand scale. Probably even sociopaths have to watch war footage in moderation so they don’t start feeling insecure about their relatively low-impact killing sprees.
Speaking of war, many people have pointed out that a dozen or so innocent students getting pepper-sprayed (no matter how outrageous and unwarranted it was) comes nowhere close to the magnitude of tragedy in Iraq. That’s true. You could relate it to a million, arguably more devastating and atrocious things—the heroin epidemic on the east coast, or, Jesus, HIV rates in Uganda. But the footage from the UC Davis incident struck a chord for a number of reasons. That ten seconds or so—from the moment the officer holds that can aloft to the moment he finishes applying a second coat of mace to the seated protester’s faces from a range of a few inches—provides a powerful snapshot of a single incident (among many in the ongoing OCCUPY vs. Trusted People in Authority conflicts) that captures the general brutality of the police responses to the OCCUPY protests, and points to a larger problem—for this to happen, some of us haven’t been doing our jobs. Most of us haven’t been paying attention. And (echoing, on a smaller scale, the outcomes of certain Vietnam protests we perhaps thought were ancient history) it happened at an American university – a place that’s supposed to promote free thought and free speech and ideals and even civil disobedience.
I know what to expect when I see Iraq on the news. There are people with guns. There are other people with different guns. I understand the plot—not because it makes sense, but because I’ve seen it so often. And it does affect me. But not in a different way.
When it comes to UC Davis, I can’t process the image of some kids SITTING there and getting attacked by someone who should be protecting them. It’s like a nightmare. It doesn’t fit. But once my brain stops melting, I have to deal with what it is I’m seeing — what it means, what it says about my country. How things got to this point. Whether we’ll keep following a trajectory that frankly scares the shit out of me.
And then I have to grade some essays.
ANECDOTE:
A census worker called me weeks ago. “Do you know your neighbors?”
My neighbors and I wave at one another sometimes. Not always. I said, “No.”
“Do you trust them?”
“Yes.”
I did.
I do.
Even though I prefer not being on a small-talk basis with my neighbors, I trust them. If that ever changes, I’ll go — gladly. But it would take a massive cosmic shift (or them training their dogs to attack a doll with a photograph of my face glued to its head). It’s my hope that the shift our country’s experiencing will move us toward something that affirms my faith in all the people I don’t know — my fellow Americans.
A month ago, I found a little comfort in an “OCCUPY Laramie” hand-out on campus, though it’s language was questionable (something about “the cries of indigenous peoples going unheard and unanswered”) – it was a step in the right direction, a sign that students here (probably, hopefully, most of them) felt a deeper resonance with the OCCUPY message than the philosophy that working 60 hours a week at a shitty, shitty job with no health insurance is a noble route; why help anyone who can’t help himself; the best people win and the losers rightfully die; a country that encapsulates these ideas represents the highest quality of life one could possibly ever want; and that, if you don’t like it, you should shut up or leave.
Luckily, these are not our only options, despite the heavily exclamation-pointed papers expressing the contrary, which are sitting right next to me as I write this. And which I will, eventually, have to grade. And which, I should say, I’ll grade for things like grammar and clarity only, since it’s not my job to judge these students. It’s not my right either. Who the hell am I? And, again, I don’t know anything about them.
Strangers, strangers, everywhere.
I habitually leave my stuff unattended in public places. Someday, someone might actually steal my cell phone (or break into my house and explode my ferrets!). But I’ll live with the odds that probably, they won’t. Or maybe one or two people might take secretive photos of my face that they glue onto dolls that they then make out with, but whatever. I don’t want to spend my life worrying about the various ways strangers might try to take from me or hurt me or abuse photos of my face. That’s my right. I don’t want to live afraid of strangers, or my own neighbors, or my own stranger-neighbors. That would mean I could never be vulnerable, never stop worrying who might be watching and what they might do, and I probably couldn’t write. Also, most of the people around me deserve to be trusted. I don’t know that for a fact. It’s something I take for granted … you know … like the right to protest peacefully … And stuff.
The fact is, right now, participants in the OCCUPY movement see their home – America, Wyoming, their university, wherever – as a place worth occupying. They’re setting up tents. They’re standing up for one another. It’s not perfect. A girl named Ashlie ODed in her tent alone during the Vancouver protest. Police continue to handle the OCCUPY presence in the worst possible ways. But people — strangers – are coming together and trying to change something. They’re writing different kinds of papers. Goddamn. It makes me truly proud to be here for the first time in a long time.
I don’t have to know someone to like her.
I don’t have to like a lot about my country right now to stay here.
For now, I’m staying.
I hope there’s a way we can all somehow stay here together. I think it’s worth it. We’ll find out. But I really think so.
For now –
Onward, muskrats, Americans, cowboys, cowards, whatever you are, culturally or otherwise.
You’re the best people I’ve possibly never met.
Now.
Something inspiring.
THIS:
