OCCUPY NATION Paperback – August 2, 2012

May Day 2012 marked the beginning of the next political season. Last winter, the innovative phenomenon of Occupy was forcibly removed from public view by coordinated police actions across the country. With the warmer season, the question is whether Occupy will reappear, in what form and to what ends. In particular, how will it relate--or not--to the presidential campaign? For instance, will Obama be able to co-opt the anti-establishment movement to garner the disaffected youth vote that he may need to win, as he did last time.On May Day, Todd Gitlin released his e-book, "Occupy Nation", to address these important and confusing questions. The book is a sound and thoughtful analysis of last year's Occupy Wall Street movement and of the complex of issues it faces if it is to reappear as an effective force. Gitlin has been a perceptive analyst of radical American politics for 50 years, since he helped to form the New Left in the early 1960s. It is from this deeply relevant perspective that he describes the innovative nature of Occupy, its roots, its spirit and its potential.Respectful of the Occupy movement's right to continue to define itself, Gitlin refrains from proscribing to it, except to warn clearly about the temptations to detour from nonviolence--a major lesson of the 60s. In the end, Gitlin returns to the New Left mantra, the political is personal. The point is not to ask what Occupy should do now, but to question what I should do, what we should do, to make the coming season the beginning of a new beginning."Occupy Nation" is available from Amazon in Kindle format, which can be read on any computer from the Cloud Reader. It is a great read, full of insights and never bogs down. I read it carefully in about a day.

The book was a great value and it arrived in great condition, even better than I expected it to be.

Super boring book.

I was engaging in an on-line debate recently on the issue of gun control legislation. When I raised the issue of whether it might be possible to test would be gun owners to see if they had any feelings of hostility towards society, one woman pointed to the Occupy movement as a group of people she felt had hostile feelings towards society. She referred to them as "Occupy nutsies". Now I don't tend to pay all that much attention to current events. I operate on the principle that if something happens which is really important someone will tell me about it. But I did have some awareness of Occupy Wall Street and the other similar protests which sprang up in other places. I remember watching some YouTube videos from Fox News which expressed rather more about the desperation of that organisation and its perception (right or wrong) that its audience is both gullible and ignorant, than they did about what was clearly a heterogenous community not easily represented in a short television report.I saw something hopeful in this movement - a group of people unwilling to remain invisible. We live in a society where corporate advertising is very visible and so are any number of celebrities, but when the economy fails the poor and the middle class many of the effects are hidden. Sure they appear in the statistics, but statistics are just numbers. It is part of the intrinsic injustice of a hierarchical system that those in a position of power can more easily make decisions which will harm others because, very often, they will never have to look those others in the face.Alienation is the norm in our society. We are alienated from ourselves, as R.D. Laing pointed out in The Politics of Experience. But it also follows that we are alienated from each other. There was a time when we lived in closely-knit tribes, and later villages. Then there was a time where all families were extended families. Since then we have moved on to the nuclear family, and we are having trouble now even keeping that together. There are advantages in this for a growth-addicted economy. The more emotionally-empoverished our lives become because of alienation from each other the more we feel the need for material goods which will make us feel special. And the less we come together and share the more profitable wastage there is. If a group of people come together to feed themselves they can buy in bulk and have less spoiled food to throw away. And if people share each others books or DVDs or CDs, they save money but the companies putting them out make less. So for groups of people to assemble peacefully and interact with each other in public space goes beyond politics towards a healing of the spiritual cancer of alienation.I decided to read this book to find out more about how the Occupy movement viewed itself. Todd Gitlin was a part of the Sixties counter-culture. He was a founding member and third president of Students for a Democratic Society. He gives an account of the Occupy movement which is both critical and inspirational. He gives an account of how the movement came about and introduces us to representative figures. But, perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is the way in which he presents a vision of what makes the movement remarkable, what can come from it and the challenges which face it or any other movements which may grow from its seed. He also gives an impassioned warning about attacks on the First Amendment right to public assembly which reads : "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."