I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.

Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.

The place of the occupation in an important way contributes to its power. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, to my mind, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement.

Ironically, mine is first of all a “pedestrian observation,” based on very particular experience. In recent weeks, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack, including a stroll on Wall Street. And last week, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

Because it is at the symbolic center, the media are paying attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration is capturing global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. A report yesterday indicates that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces are spreading around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world is watching. Occupations are going global, eminating from ground zero to London, Seoul back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and many points in between.

They have been watching in Gdansk. I was surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there, and surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, is planning on coming to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

“Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.
They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’ ”

The news is spreading through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media are spreading the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

“This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.”

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and much more have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged. Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on fictoids, as we have been observing here at Deliberately Considered over the last year. As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long term power of the newest development on the global stage. As I observed in concluding my comparison between OWS and a social movement in South Korea, the candle light movement, a candle is, indeed, being lit.

Yesterday, I was with Steve Assael, my friend of nearly 60 years, retracing, as much as possible, his steps of ten years ago. He worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield on the 25th floor of North Tower of the WTC. The vivid specificity of his memories was moving, from the opening tragedy, the paraplegic colleague who couldn’t escape because the elevators weren’t working and his co worker who decided to stay with him, to the loneliness of direct experience, riding on the subway in Queens along with the daily commuters ten years ago and walking downtown yesterday. We spoke, walked, looked around, remembered 9/11/01 as a day of personal experience and national trauma. I wondered and worried about how the people we saw yesterday remember.  I recalled that the U.S. has been implicated consequentially in the suffering of so many others since that day. Steve and I don’t agree on such matters, but political discussion wasn’t on the agenda.

We met in Penn Station at 7:45. The time, more or less, he had arrived on his morning commute from Massapequa, Long Island, ten years ago. We took the express train downtown to Chambers Street, as he did then. Instead of a crowd of office workers, we joined the anniversary memorial ceremony, part of the general public observers (only the relatives of those who died were included in the ceremony). Steve later told me that he had hoped that by chance he would bump into one of the hundreds of people whom he knew when he worked there. But, ironically, we met my friend and colleague Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, one of the most important and troubling books of recent decades.

We passed through a security checkpoint at 8:30. We were a couple of blocks from the memorial, with a clear view of the rising tower. We observed the ceremony on a huge television screen and listened to the reading of the names for a while, and heard the dignitaries’ readings. Our project was to wander, look around, and talk. So we moved on after my friend Mike Asher’s name was read off. My book, The Politics of Small Things, is dedicated to Mike and was an imagined extended conversation with him. Mike worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104^th floor of the North Tower.

Steve spoke to me more openly about what he had seen, heard and smelled that day than he has in the past ten years, about feeling the impact of the jet in his office, about the hesitancy to walk down, the crowded stairwell, stopping on the 14^th floor. When people lower in the stairwell were warning about the danger of fire and smoke, he and a group of others went into an office suite there.

The phones were working. The room was illuminated (perhaps by sunlight). The assembled people weren’t sure what they should do. They then moved quickly on at the urging of a fireman, who Steve pointed out probably saved his life. The fireman was panting, running up the stairs, warning people, encouraging them to go down. Steve’s gift to the fireman was a glass of water. Steve had intended to use the water to dampen a cloth as he went through anticipated heavy smoke, but he figured the fireman needed it more than he did, and that puddles on the ground would probably work, if water was needed. At first, Steve assumed that the fireman was among the dead, but reading more about the events of the day weeks later, he holds onto the hope that the hero of his story was among the firemen who did turn back and survive.

Steve got out. The stairs were no longer crowded. He had to time his run across the plaza outside the building, avoiding falling objects and people, and the resulting obstacles on the ground. He and a colleague hesitated at the entrance of the Millennium Hotel. They wondered if they could help, watched for a while, saw the towers swaying. A cop shouted to them to get out of there. And they headed uptown. Around Chinatown, they felt the collapse. Steve’s colleague walked to Grand Central Station. Steve walked over the Queensborough Bridge, took a subway to Jamaica and caught his Long Island Railway train home.

Walking uptown and riding out of the city, Steve moved from the scene of the crime into a world that strikingly resembled normal everyday life. He, they, we, were all bewildered and dismayed, not sure what would happen next. We knew something big happened, but unsure about how we would proceed. He experienced the trauma directly. For us, it took time to sink in. And now remembering is a challenge.

As Steve and I walked back to Penn Station, I got to thinking about how we are remembering. I appreciated Gary Alan Fine’s post last week on the need to forget, the normality of it. Forgetting is an important part of remembering. In order to remember some things, we have to forget others. Certainly, we have to forget as thoroughly as we can the purported lessons of The Kids Book of Freedom: The 9/11 Coloring Book. It is clearly destructive, but also is the fear that led to the abuse of fundamental liberties in and by the United States in the past ten years. We need to remember cautiously, avoiding too easy lessons and comfortable myths.

Odd that Steve and I bumped into Jan Gross, as we started our walk uptown away from the memorial, along the promenade by the Hudson River. Jan upset memory in Poland, in his books Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest. Jan has been challenging Poland, and, more broadly, Europe to face up to the degree to which the genocide of Jews in Europe was an active Polish, and European affair, not only a German or Nazi one. They need to forget the self-righteous stories of opposition,  and realize the complexities, the degree to which heroism was accompanied by collaboration and active complicity. Not the Nazis, but their Catholic neighbors killed the Jews of Jedwabne, Gross documented. His are tough books, difficult for many to accept. They have changed my view of the world. Remembering accurately is a challenge. It requires forgetting, abandoning satisfying myths.

Walking with Steve yesterday, I realized that this is our challenge as well.