What’s Next for Occupy

Everybody wants to know what is next for the Occupy movement, and no one knows. Nor may we. Nor will we. Nor should we.

What Occupy has done is reinvigorate the art of the surprise, the craft of worship and ritual, the soul force in activism. It has changed the conversation and occupied the holiday tables of America. What will be said at Seders and Easter dinners? What will be said on the Fourth of July? The genie is out of the bottle. A kind of truth is being spoken—clumsily and consistently.

Occupy has unseated the pragmatic from its throne and replaced it with a mighty emptiness. That emptiness is as pregnant as any womb before fertilization, any wound before its healing, any glass before its filling. During the week before Christmas, on the fourth night of Chanukah, forty or so faith leaders gathered on three days’ notice. One faith leader from Occupy D.C. said, “It was like I was liquefied and poured out.” Our introductory go-around was to tell each other what we were like before Occupy and what we are like now. The theme was: I was politically depressed. Now I am spiritually and politically awakened. I used to be a pacifist. Now I am an occupier. I used to be unemployed. Now I have work to do.

Pragmatism is a very good thing in a prophet. And it is not enough. We have been flattened by our own pragmatism. We have been spiritually deadened and issue-organized into smithereens. The mizraim come to mind. The mizraim are the set of boundaries and pigeonholes that separate you from the whole and narrow you into their narrow way. What, you aren’t fighting for abortion while fighting for tenants’ rights, while being anti-racist and multi-faith all at the same time? Instead of being liquefied and poured out, pragmatic, issue-oriented prophecy has hardened us into parts and their partiality. Pragmatic organizing made us worry about what we weren’t doing while managing by objective what we were doing.

Occupy—with its glance at all issues, deep enough to see their roots—has radicalized us. Radical is the drilling to the center of the problem. What we have seen is that the issues are connected. The unnecessary suffering of the woman who needs an abortion due to her lack of access to contraception is connected to the unnecessary suffering of the senior whose building is being sold so the landlord can make more money off it. The unnecessary suffering of the more than 846,000 black men in prison, jail, on probation or parole—more black men than were enslaved before the Civil War began—when for less cost to taxpayers they could go to Harvard, is connected to the constant harassment of Muslim Americans on the street. And there are more connections.

If you are the type of prophet who reads my sample of sufferings and wonders where your “issue” is, I understand. I used to be that kind of activist. I only worked on immigrant rights—until I realized we weren’t going to blunt any instruments without economic rights for all Americans, including those who now question their support for Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the notorious proponent of racial profiling against Latinos. Through the Occupy movement’s theater and ritual, and through worship and its consequential dethronement of pragmatism, the issues-based prophets have come to see that “issues” organizing is too flat to succeed in its objectives. It is too dry. It doesn’t see how culture and economy, sexism and poverty, and queer exclusions and not bothering to vote are interconnected. One root of our troubles is the unjust economy that tries to pretend it works for all but instead just trickles down on people’s heads. A second root is a political system that is run by the same money—and has no intention of working for a just economy. Better said, in the old language of the issues-based prophets, like my former self, the root of the problem is a political economy, which is protected by untrue, well...