I don't put a lot of myself in this blog.
I like to write, I like to share my opinions... but I don't like a lot of personal detail. Who I am, What I do, Where I live, the bagel I ate this morning... not really what I want to write about. I like being online as anonymously as possible. Part of the reason I chose this route is tied up in everything I learned about how to write: no personal pronouns, every experience but my own... I will likely make a lousy memoirist.
So as much I like to share my opinions, I don't like them to be driven by personal animus. I write about politics, and my opinions on the issues of the day... but I try not to get too personal about it. The issues I write about may touch me personally (it's less than you might think), but to write about them, for me, is to figure out what makes them about more than me. The things I've written have led to a lot of interesting conversations, a lot of assumptions about my politics, my beliefs, what drives my thinking. Some of it's accurate, and some of it isn't. I don't much worry about it; I certainly don't take a lot of the responses personally. I am not what I write, and on most things, I tend to keep my own, separate, counsel.
Try this - I'm the kind of Democrat who, faced with a choice not liberal enough for me, goes with "Mr. Rent Is Too Damn High." Go figure. And try to square that with friends who think I'm probably subscribing to National Review.
One thing I have not written about - and no, I don't plan to start now - is how this economic and financial crisis we have at the national level has affected me and my family. I suppose it's easy enough to infer - I work in a coffee shop, after all - but daily documentation of my various financial challenges isn't my scene. The story of this financial crisis - what it's wrought, how bad it's gotten - is, to me, a story larger than any one of us.
That said, I think there's been a real failure by the media to really give the depths of people's financial woes much in the way of documentation and shape. Lots of people are out of work, lots of people face foreclosure, mounting bills, loans coming due... yet these stories reach us through an enormous filter. Part of it, of course, is about a general media failure when it comes to reporting on poverty issues. But part of it, I think, is generally about what many people would rather not know - if it's that bad, if people are suffering that terribly... well, that would be awful, and awfully painful to bear. Yet it's embarrassing, one of the real shames of our nation, and not a new one: how do we go on, when so much suffering happens around us?
There are times when the lack of coverage of poverty and poverty issues makes me furious. Right now, I'm not so much furious about it as dismayed. Not having a lot of good documentation of poverty issues, at a time when poverty is exploding, makes writing about it hard. And beyond that, I suspect a lot of people have been falling into poverty with no real compass about how to live through it. Part of what good poverty reporting would do would be to provide light for people just discovering its realities as they join its ranks.
In some sense, I think, I've discounted part of what's likely very cathartic about Occupy Wall Street - the sense that these protests give the people participating a chance to share an experience. A chance to shout out, yes, it's that bad. There's real suffering out here. Why can't people see it?
And, in part, the reason I discount these protests is that the claims of "raising awareness" are the ones that really strike me as old. This is not a new crisis we are living through. Mortgage foreclosures bloomed into a major problem almost 4 years ago. The crises in banking and markets that followed as the mortgages collapsed are also a story several years old. The sense that "we don't know how this was allowed to happen" are long gone - there's nearly a wall full of books to explain just how much was known, just how little was done, and just how bad things remain.
But I think this year, for a number of reasons, has put some reality around the abstract sense that these hard times are not temporary. And though many of us - certainly me, people I know, people who've immersed themselves in the details of the financial crisis - knew this would last; others, I think, are just figuring some of this out. And realizing, slowly, that these hard times will not be contained to some group of "other." This crisis has touched so many of us... and more, I think, before all is said and done.
When I wrote my previous post on Occupy Wall Street, I was concerned most about the lack of a sense of defined purpose; I remain frustrated, especially, by the seeming all-over-the-place aspects of what Occupy Wall Street is meant to accomplish, the lack of a clearly explained, well defined set of goals to result. As I said, I don't think it's wildly unreasonable, or unrealistic, to suggest that protest needs a purpose. And I think, still, it's terrible to cast the "financial crisis" as a confusing black box - when the problems are definable, explicable, and actual ways to address the excesses exist.
But my own visceral reaction - of how this protest fits into my own personal experiences of life in the meltdown - does remind me that the personal is political, and perhaps the lens of how this protest is being viewed is skewed for some. The real touchstone of this protest, I'm starting to suspect, is the discovery that others are sharing a similar experience, that, yes, is being cast a shared sense of anger... but beyond that, I think, is something more basic: these are hard times... and people are having a hard time.
The problem, I think, with making Occupy Wall Street a moment to connect over shared difficulties is multifaceted. For one thing, I think the overall message is downbeat. There's a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that I think many don't have the luxury to indulge in, or share. Another aspect is that, as I've said, the protests offer no real sense of solutions, either to individual challenges (practical issues about bill paying, putting food on a table, and such), or our national problems that linger (foreclosure, bank regulation, our broken poltical processes).
But the aspect that perhaps exasperates me - as I pondered this all this afternoon - is this sense of people protesting poverty problems as if they were somehow new, and new because, well, now people whose lives were previously comfortable have realized the challenges when those comforts erode. I understand well the sense of newfound fear, the sense of regret, the anger, the profound confusion of a life that's sailing into uncharted waters. But as my life circumstances have changed, and I've met more people whose lives never had some of the privileges mine did (and in a number of significant aspects, still does), part of what I've learned is... I didn't invent living in hard times. I'm just a late arrival.
The personal is, yes, political. My politics have always been defined by my experiences, the things I've known, the the things that have happened. Hard times have, no doubt, altered those politics. I'm less patient with debating abstractions. I'm less interested in batting about ideas just for the sake of batting them around. My demands and expectations are about action, doing, making. Do something. Take action. Make change.
As I said in that discussion thread... I hope I turn out to be wrong, that Occupy Wall Street somehow shows itself as a potent force, a change making event, something that moves us forward in these very hard times. I don't think that's what will happen, and in part - from a distance, outside of my own experience - the reason I doubt this protest is because so much of what drives it is so personal, so deeply felt. I'm not trying to figure out financial reform because it will help me personally, because I feel sad or angry about my personal hard times. I'll be okay, thanks, at least for now. What I need, what I have to demand... is that there's help for many. Practical help for basic survival, and national help to break the hold of corporate financial interests.
We all need help, and giving in to fear, frustration, and yes, sadness, won't solve much. And I say that, most of all, from personal experience.
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