Author Josh Swiller Speaks Out On the Mindset Of The Occupy Wall St Protester

 

 

Josh Swiller, the author of NY Times bestseller The Unheard” , and frequent contributor to many National publications, shared his thoughts recently, on the current mindset behind the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

 

 

An Open Letter to Wall Street on Thanksgiving:

 

by Josh Swiller

 

Looking at the Occupy Wall Street protests that started outside your windows and have spread across the country you might understandably be confused.  Across the country, people are confused — inspired or enraged but mostly confused. What are they doing, the protestors? What do they want? If only they could clarify their goals then we could determine whether we’re for them or against them; then we could proudly slap their stickers on our bumpers or denounce them if need be. If only they were more clear.

 

But the thing is, they’ve already made it crystal clear what they’re protesting for. It’s not for socialism or communism or wealth repatriation or whatever the popular term is now; it’s not for health care, or even for taxes on the rich or for jobs. Many want these things, certainly, but those are just manifestations of something deeper. And that deeper thing is not, as many have concluded, fear. Fear of the economy, fear of their fates — fear invokes intense, immediate and unmistakable responses and those are not what OWS is about.  Fear also comes from feeling separate from something – when something is a part of us, how can we fear it?

 

So what is that thing? What is this whole protest about?

 

In a word: decency.

 

Decency is the very thing that holds society together – the unspoken agreement to be fair and kind and just to our fellows. And decency has begun to fray and disappear in our society. Forget the esoteric idea of a common good – how does one go around measuring common good? – but with our families, our friends and the other people we meet in the day-to-day, and in our relationships to the world itself, decency is being lost.

 

This is what brings protestors out to the streets in snow and wind and rain.

 

Not fear. Not policy. Not politicians.

 

Turn on Fox News and what is transfixing about it (or to others, horrifying) is not the illuminating and inspiring discussions of tax codes and job creation and constitutional law but the utter lack of decency. Hosts yell at guests, guests yell at hosts – and these are people who agree! With unblinking gusto, reporters say things they know to be untrue and are never called to account. It heralds a world utterly without decency. A world of rage.

 

What stays with the viewers of their programs is, again, not the logic of their arguments but their sheer, palpable ferocity.

 

Rage is cleansing. Rage supersedes doubt and fear. Rage posits there is a right way and a wrong way, black and a white, my way and yours, two and only two choices. And the world is so complicated — how wonderful to be in a world with only two things! So immigrants all have to leave or you’re an amnesty magnet. All taxes must be cut or you’re a socialist. You agree with everything I say or you hate America.

 

So cleansing in its simplicity, rage is, but it lacks all decency.

 

This form of discourse has found a dance partner on the far left. People and pundits there now argue that any kind of compromise is a corrupt. There must be single-payer, universal health care, and Bill O’Reilly is a lying liar telling lies. And here, look, we caught another politician on the take. Let’s put together a humorous video about it! But this reaction is the same game, same emotion, just at a different tenor.

 

And what’s lost by all is decency.

 

Which brings us back to the protests. Now pundits are saying if the protestors are not clearer in what they want they will lose their moment – we actually, we will lose the moment. It will get cold and they’ll go home and the bankers will still be banking, the system gamers will still be system gaming, the handsomely paid tv ragers will still be raging. The protestors will have lost.

 

This misses the crucial point: decency always loses. Always. Decency, in fact, only wins by losing. When decency meets rage in an alley, rage will beat it black and blue or blind it with pepper spray, and will then, if necessary, arrest it and explain why it had no choice in the matter. Decency against rage – it’s a no contest.

 

So decency loses. It gets up. It loses again. It gets up. It loses again. And again. You get the picture. But at some point, something changes. Because decency doesn’t disappear. Decency is innate in our being – rage is actually made of much flimsier stuff. It burns hot, it burns out. Decency remains. Having been a hospice worker, I can tell you that at the very end, decency is what remains.

 

So the protestors will get beat up. The beat-uppers will explain why. They will quote laws and contracts. They will beat them up again. The protestors will react with patience and decency. And then one day, you go to church and you hear a sermon on turning the other cheek. On how we should not attach to material things. Or you are alone with someone you love who is dying and the last words are not “Fuck those people” but “The only thing that matters in life is love.” Or you study your fists after you’ve just broken a cheekbone and there’s a cut on your knuckle and the guy you hit says, let me help you with that. Or you just stare out of a window during a break at work and see a sunset embued with more colors than you thought one sunset could hold and you think: oh my, oh my, wait, really now did I think the sum total of my life was what I accomplished? What I owned? You do not know it, but exactly one month and four days from now you will slip on ice and a stranger will rush forward and save you from cracking your skull. You will have been saved then by decency, that one time. And that’s all it takes for the walls of the fortress of selfishness to begin to corrode. One moment, one act of decency, wherever it may spring from.

 

Decency always loses. Decency never does.