Repost of a great article by Lia Grainger; a Toronto journalist who got down on the ground old school styles to conceive this insightful and well-written piece of journalism contemplating the ebbs and flows of this winter’s discontented Occupy movement.
Among the rebels
There is no camping on the White House lawn. On the Wednesday before American Thanksgiving, when President Barack Obama drives down a darkened windy H Street and turns into the gated driveway that leads to his abode, no tents sully the immaculately manicured grass. One block away, several hundred people bed down in tents, tarps and cardboard on the modest rectangle of wet grass and snaking pavement known as McPherson Square—as close as they can get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. I climb into my two-person MEC tent and join the dissidents.
The surrounding buildings light my nylon interior bright as noon. Eight days ago, I left the comfort of my Toronto home to spend the winter visiting Occupy Wall Street camps and actions across the United States. This is stop number two—last week was New York, and I’ve already spent two nights here in the capitol. Last night was a wet one: heavy rainfall had saturated the earth, turning the grass into icy mud that coated everything—my boots, my clothes, the walls of my tent. The smell of tobacco from hand-rolled cigarettes still hangs in the cold air.
It hasn’t taken long to get to know my neighbours. Nearby, in his own little tent is 57-year-old Frosty, a grandfatherly homeless man who started helping in the camp kitchen after he was kicked out of D.C.’s Old Post Office Pavilion by Homeland Security. A few yards away beneath a patchwork of tarp and plastic is 18-year-old Elliot from Northampton, Massachusetts, a pensive adolescent who has been waiting his whole short life for a movement like this to sweep across the nation. In a large communal tent just off 15th St., a half-dozen new arrivals from New York City doze, including a young Queens native named Kelley. The pint-sized instigator has led the crew on a 230-mile, two-week march from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, spreading the Occupy gospel along the way.
Like them, I’d ditched everything—job and home—to experience a pivotal moment in the history of our monumental neighbours to the south, and perhaps in our own nation’s history as well. As a 30-year-old, raised by baby boomer parents who took me on peace marches before I could walk, I had inherited a casual commitment to social justice issues and environmentalism that was more theoretical than practical. I had never felt any real ability to influence the political world. Coming of age in a global world sometimes makes corruption and inequality seem insurmountable. You’re not just fighting local or national power; you’re pushing up against the world. Suddenly, here was 2011: Tunisia, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol. Individuals were upsetting the order of things by simply standing together. Something big and important and kind of wonderful was happening—something outside of the realm of normal, everyday, North American experience, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to join them.
we are communicating 