WHY ARE WE HERE?

by riseanddecolonize

WHY ARE WE HERE?

Ask any two people involved with the Occupy Movement this question and you are most likely to get two different answers. What must be recognized when attempting to define the Occupy Movement and when seeking to identify its goals is that we are a movement composed of vastly varying perspectives. “We are the 99%,” but “the 99%” contains people with a mass of different grievances and potential solutions to the current state of the world. We have all come together in response to the same call to action, “Occupy Wall Street.” However, this call to action is only a common catalyst; we have been mobilized by the same target—Wall Street and the vast inequalities in material wealth and power represented by it. What this movement is about then, is creating new spaces for political activity and community engagement to take place. We declare the spaces of the occupations as places where an equality of voices may exist; the spaces of Occupation seek to build democracy from the ground up.

Right now, the process of democracy is the most fundamental aspect of this movement and must not be undermined by a sense of urgency for products or other results; because our primary product is democracy itself and we have already begun to take possession of it through the creation of these spaces. Allow this to continue to unfold.

In broader society, outside of the spaces of the Occupations, many people have their attention captured and their imagination dominated by a story being told. This story is continuing to be told in a way that supports those who are telling it and which also controls those who are uncritically listening to it. This story is being told by all of the mainstream media corporations, elected officials, and their mutual friends in the major banks and other transnational corporations. The story says that there exists a power elite who control our world and that the rest of us need to appeal to them or attempt to get more of ‘our own’ within their ranks in order to affect change. This is not actually the case.

What we are realizing with the Occupy Movement is that the power is within all of us—all we need to do is realize this and cease to believe the stories telling us otherwise while shifting our focus to building a better world. The dominant narrative of the world now, the story being told by “the 1%,’ is that only one possible world exists and the majority of people have no power to create it. It is the job of the Occupy Movement to subvert this message and liberate our self from that horror story. All of the laws empowering corporate interests, waging war on the planet and its peoples, torturing people, and putting masses of people in prisons in order to protect the interests of “the 1%,” and even the people who feel trapped into playing their roles within this grand story—the inflexibility of all this goes away once we begin to act as beings capable of telling our own stories. Act as though the world is not doomed to be as it is.

For this movement to continue to gain momentum, we need more people to wake up from the matrix created by the mainstream media and all of its mutually reinforcing storytellers; stop believing that we are powerless to create a better world and begin working with others to create a world in which many worlds fit—a world in which each and every being has agency that is recognized and valued by everyone else. Wake up!