MiBlog

The Dead Flag Blues by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

(17 minutes long; mood music with occasional voice-overs)

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Right now, sitting comfortably, I can think of nothing I’d rather support, nothing I’d rather devote my talents and aspirations and privileges to more than Occupy Wall Street. The problem is, something inside me is genuinely afraid to do it. Nay, not afraid; helpless, hopeless.

And yet this is exactly the kind of movement the modern world needs—a harkening back to the collective determination of the 60s, but with grander hopes, deeper desperation, and of course, unparalleled necessity. Only rarely have my emotions become so invested in the goals of others (but others of the same), immersed as I currently am in the news of worldwide OWS protests.

My dismay is this: I’ve been writing criticisms of the movement for the past couple hours. I just can’t bring myself to publish them, because, obviously, it would be counterproductive. But this is exactly my ‘fear’: I can’t turn off my critical thinking, even when doing so is unwarranted, and I have an unsettling feeling that this’ll turn out to be a rather damning allegory for the world’s upcoming treatment of OWS manoeuvres.

My opinion, in other words, is this: somewhere along the line, ‘unity’ requires pruning one’s own critical thinking, and that may be exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

Take, for instance, this brief excerpt from an (astute) opinion piece entitled “America’s growing anti-intellectualism”:

If America is to find its way once again, its people cannot rely on simply delegating this task to others—to think, to dream or to act in their behalf. “Occupy Wall Street” or be occupied by it. That is the simple choice we face.

In many ways, this is great advice—at the deepest level this is precisely the choice we each need to make. But I trust you’ll see the paradox as quickly as I did: reduction to dichotomy is no more imaginative a tactic than donkey vs. elephant.

And earlier in the article: its thesis—which only furthers this paradox:

Finally, as Graeber’s powerful op-ed reminds us, we’ve suffered a grievous lack of imagination in coping with the global financial crises, which has only somewhat abated for a while. This failure is most astonishing, considering that we already know what is needed from the experience of multiple nations during the Great Recession—yet we simply cannot imagine doing something similar today. The necessary and humane has become utterly unimaginable to us. Our imagination deficit precludes us from even considering the real solutions to the other deficits that confront us.

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My fear is this: I’m instinctively certain that OWS’s valiant efforts will not succeed in the short term (and sadly, that’s all that seems to matter nowadays). Not because of a lack of imagination on the part of its organizers and demonstrators or even their opponents, nor simply because the outdated structures are too deep-rooted to weed out, but crucially, I think, because the educated people, the critical thinkers, and ostensible status quo breakers, possess exactly these kinds of divergent minds.

For if the world is a game and we are its players, I’m forced to admit that entropy has never yet lost. Nor will it ever.

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That said, there’s really no sense in not trying to make our slice of history a revolutionary one :)