Last night, Charissa and I sent our boys off to their grandparents' for the weekend, so we spent a night on the town. We went downtown for chocolates and coffee then decided to take a stroll to see the OKC National Memorial because Charissa had never seen it at night. On the way, we were surprised to see a large group of people in a downtown park, which is usually home to a number of homeless. But this looked like a rally. Complete with a News 9 van. So seeing some Bricktown police officers I know, we went and asked what was going on.
Turns out, the Occupy Wall Street movement had come to Oklahoma City. So, in front of me were a group of well meaning revolutionaries wanting to voice their concern that the wealth of this country was in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.
This is a obviously not a new complaint, and it's a concern that I should be careful to note here that I share. I think it's appropriate to ask whether or not a democracy where so much power is held by so few can be a democracy at all. When small groups of people hold the money, and therefore the power to make their voices heard, the rest must either agree with them or be silenced. This is obviously a huge problem in a democracy, and one that I think is a political reality in our country. I think it's fair to ask if our democracy isn't something more like an oligarchy.
I also sympathize with the complaint that wealth is not spread more equitably. So few have so much, while so many have so little. This is and always has been a reality in our world. But the problem seems somehow more insidious in a country in which hard work is supposed to be the key to success, where our own national mythos holds that if one simply works as hard as one can, one can and will rise. Of course, for many, this is simply untrue. For the uneducated, the poor, the handicapped, and many others is positions of disadvantage, it is awfully hard in this country to rise much above one's stature no matter how hard one works. After all, if you go from being a fry cook to a shift leader, you haven't really gone so far after all. This is a sad and awful reality. One that compromises our democratic ideals. One that, perhaps, calls for revolution.
But what I saw in the park last night was not a revolution. It was not revolutionary. It was not even in touch with the real problem. The fact is, the whole "I am the 99%" line is a sham. I did not see the poor, the stricken, the underprivileged, the oppressed. I saw no minorities (though I did see one African American woman on the News 9 story), and in an interesting irony, I saw not one homeless person in a park where homeless people sleep every night. What I did see were a lot of upper-middle-class white people, many college students (one even carrying a sign with an OU logo printed on it), wearing interesting and expensive body art and piercings, taking pictures of each other with smart phones, and all-in-all having a jolly time.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with upper-middle-class white people noticing and speaking out about social inequities (I am, after all, all of these things). But as I listened to their speeches and watched their interviews, I became more and more aware that the people I was listening to didn't have a clue, and in fact had no compulsion to enact anything like the kind of social revolution that would change this country.
I found that I wanted to get up and speak myself (I didn't). I wanted to ask for a show of hands in answer to these questions: How many of you know what is at 800 W. California? What about 1335 W. Sheridan? How may of you have ever been to SW 8th and Rockwood? SW 15th and Westwood? NE 28th and Kelley?
These addresses describe the City Rescue Mission and the Jesus House. SW 8th and Rockwood is an intersection less than a mile from the opulence of the new Devon Building. The street at this intersection and for a few blocks on either side of it is in such disrepair that it is not even paved. Meanwhile the city that says it doesn't have money in the budget to fix the street is re-doing the Myriad Gardens--the front yard of the Devon building. These other intersections are the locations of large public housing projects in the inner city.
Then I wanted to ask them how many of them had been to Bricktown? To a Thunder game? To an OU-Texas party?
What I saw last night was not a collection of people dedicated to bringing about change. Instead, I saw a collection of college students who wanted to take part in something and leftovers from the 60's wanting to relive their own college years. Occupy OKC may as well have been a flash mob.
For those of us in the upper middle class, real change must begin with our admission that we are not victims in some class struggle between millionaires and thousandaires. We are suspects. We are people who demand to be heard but who blithely ignore the problems of people much less fortunate than ourselves--people who really are oppressed and poverty stricken. We complain that our student loan rates are unfair considering our sorry job prospects while we ignore the man working six days a week sweeping the street up after our protests. We don't even know that when we're sleeping in after a Saturday full of college football games and fun nights in the Paseo, he'll be getting up at 4:00 and walking to Labor Ready so he can be in line before all the good jobs are gone. We don't know about. We don't care about him. Yet we demand that something be done about him.
So, my complaint in this blog is against pretend revolutionaries. My exhortation, though, is for real ones--would be revolutionaries who don't know what to do. It's as simple as this:
Do Something!
Realize that standing in a park under the Sandridge building hoping Tom Ward will throw some money down does nothing to change the status quo. Get out of the park and into the community. I've often half-joked that I want a revolution led by Jesus Christ and Kurt Vonnegut. That's because these men both realized that change happens by getting among people and helping, eating with them, hearing their problems, being a voice for them. And doing these things (as Paulo Freire has suggested) not as patronizing liberators but as neighbors.
Sure, both these men took to the streets as protesters (Jesus was after all killed for the things he said), but they both understood that this in not where the real work is done. The real work is done by being kind to people. By living among them.
You want to see wealth redistributed? Start with your own. Feed and clothe people, even if it costs you your smart phone. Care for the sick, even if it costs you a semester or two of college. Go into foreign countries or even poor neighborhoods in your own country, even if you're uncomfortable. Use the privilege of your education to understand and voice the concerns of people who need an advocate. Put down your sign and pick up your shovel.
