What do these people want? What are they advocating? In the opinion of many, including Gary Alan Fine in his last post, it is easy to discern what OWS is against, but unclear what they are for. They know how to say no, he knows, but he wonders if they can say yes. He thinks this both about OWS and The Tea Party, as a detached but sympathetic observer of both.

Looking at OWS up close, taking part in a small but significant activity, I think the positive commitments of OWS are actually quite clear, and in marked contrast to The Tea Party. As I maintained in The Politics of Small Things, the democracy is in the details. I had an opportunity to look at some details in a corner of Zuccotti Park, joining the OWS Think Tank.

Many of the OWS activists who have taken part in The Flying Seminar sessions are active in the Think Tank. We started working together at The New School teach in. They have been among the active members of the seminar. I have visited them a couple of times in Zuccotti Park, and earlier this week, on Monday, I joined them in their work there. It was an illuminating afternoon.

From noon to 6:00, the Think Tank conducts discussion sessions of a special sort on a variety of topics.  Many different people facilitate the discussions. I responded to an email call for help and volunteered to do my part. The workshop topics range from the quite general, to the immediate and practical. They hope to inform decision-making in the park and to further understanding of problems of broad public concern, and even contribute to the formulation of policy positions and recommendations. It’s one of the spaces where the big questions about the occupation are being answered in daily practice, a striking case of the politics of small things. It confirmed for me that in politics the means are a significant part of its ends, the form at least as important as its content.

At the session I facilitated, the topic of discussion was mental illness and Occupy Wall Street. The subject was put on the agenda by a very practical activist. He wanted to discuss the problems of mental illness, substance abuse and health problems and Occupy Wall Street. He had a pressing need to address these issues, as significant social problems of the city are appearing in the park and dealing with the problems is quite challenging. We focused on mental illness and we talked about it both as a general issue, and as one in the park that required action.

We talked for about two hours. There were multiple voices, presenting different positions, revealing different sensibilities and experiences. Two people talked about their own struggles with diagnoses of mental illness, one thought of himself as a survivor of misdiagnosis and the madness of the mental health establishment, the other, a young woman, as a healed person, thanks to proper medical care. She spoke about how she would have been attracted to the occupation when she was deeply troubled, how she would have wanted to be where the action is, but how her response would have been off, more about her own internal troubles, less about public affairs. The critical young man reported that he was subjected in rehab to drug treatments, which were far worse than the drugs that got him institutionalized. The healed young woman spoke empathetically for people who suffer, about the need to empathize with their situation and to treat them with compassion. The man and the woman didn’t debate. They joined the discussion drawing upon their different experiences. While they didn’t agree in their general assessment of mental illness, they both pointed to a course of action that started with respect for the dignity of troubled people. But of course, this did not settle the matter.

Others joined in, including a woman who worked on mental health issues (I never quite got precisely what she did), the activist who was seeking insight to address difficult problems of aggression and fights in the park, and a woman who emphasized the need for practical action because of a case of sexual assault a few days ago.

The discussion moved back and forth between the general question of approaches to the mentally disturbed and very pressing matters concerning the peace and good feelings in the park. There was the occasional disruption also, particularly an older man who very much wanted more to talk than listen and had his own agenda, criticizing the focus of OWS and the Think Tank, maintaining that the first imperative is to fight against corrupt politicians, including, perhaps even especially, Barack Obama. I really wasn’t paying close attention to his words. Mostly as a novice Think Tank facilitator I was focused on keeping the group on the topic as they were developing it.

But generally speaking, staying on topic was not a problem. The competing progressive approaches that were discussed, I believe, were more or less like what one might come across in a discussion among psychiatrists, from those who are deeply committed to pharmaceutical solutions to those who are radically opposed. No policy was suggested. We didn’t come close to that. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for many reasons. But major issues were highlighted: to turn or not to turn to the professionals outside the park, love and compassion versus safety, treating people as equals versus addressing clear disabilities. There was a realization that general social problems were appearing inside the occupation, inevitably, leading to a need for responsible action.

Nothing was solved. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of this discussion. It was one among many, without apparent immediate consequences. But, on the other hand, it revealed, at least to me, the answer to the question about what OWS wants. The participants in our OWS Think Tank session were all there because they were saying no to the way corporate power has distorted democracy. They see increasing inequality as a moral, political and economic scandal. They have a sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with the prevailing order of things. Saying no brings them together. This is of crucial importance, as Adam Michnik underscored in his dialogue with OWS at the Flying Seminar. “At a certain point you have to say no and the ability to say no is a revolutionary ability.” Yet, once they are together, they are moving beyond no and saying yes, as they act in each other’s presence and consider complicated problems together. The way they interact reveal their positive commitments. Careful mutually respectful discussions, open to opposing political positions, focused on pressing problems in practical ways, not forgetting primary commitments to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. I saw this at the Think Tank. I don’t think that this is what I would see at a Tea Party meeting. I await Fine’s or a Tea Party supporter’s response.

I know this may still appear to be of little consequence beyond the immediate interaction. But I think it has, involving the media representation of OWS and the deep task of reinventing political culture. I will turn to these issues in my next posts. Hint: involved will be my thoughts on the Occupation and Obama, and the Democratic Party more broadly, and the link between the Occupation and other social movements, especially labor unions. I will consider the problem OWS has in its relations with a broad public, not only speaking in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act.

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.