Rebuild the Dream by Van Jones

Author:Van Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568587158
Publisher: Nation Books

OCCUPY WALL STREET

The American people continued to suffer and hunger for answers. Neither the waning Obama brand nor the vitriolic Tea Party brand held much appeal for many in the rising generation. So on September 17, 2011, a bunch of young people in sleeping bags appeared on the scene.

Occupy Wall Street brought to the Heart Space its predominant emotions: righteous indignation and occasional outrage. Occupiers magnetized every imaginable form of media. A search on YouTube for the “99%” turned up 241,000 videos, while a search for “Tea Party,” a movement that’s been going ten times longer (about thirty-four months, at the time of writing, versus less than three months of Occupy), yields 237,000. YouTube has been occupied, as has every form of social media.

Notably, the Twitter-for-photos blogging platform, Tumblr, emerged as a potent way to collect and share stories from the Occupiers and the people who shared their outrage. The “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr invites people to write on paper their experiences of how the economic crises are impacting their lives, take a photo of themselves holding it, and post it. “Allow us to introduce ourselves,” reads the site. “We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.” It quickly went viral. By October there were nearly one hundred posts a day.

Spin-offs included a Dave Chappelle–style satire that featured pictures of America’s best-off rubbing their riches in our faces: “We Are the 1%, Bitches.” There’s one featuring uber-cute lolcats complaining about how they, too are suffering as their human companions scrimp: “We Are the 99 Purrcent.” A progressive group called Resource Generation that works with young people with high net worth launched “We Stand with the 99 Percent.” It features 1%-ers who believe in redistributing wealth.

There is even—and linguist George Lakoff must love this one—a conservative “backlash” Tumblr called “We are the 53%.” That number is based on the percentage of Americans that pay federal taxes, with the implication that supporters of Occupy Wall Street comprise the 47% who do not because of poverty or tax credits. What Lakoff would admire is that the 99% brand is still being reinforced here, even as it is rebutted. Score!

Elsewhere, poet and national treasure Drew Dellinger brought the following words: “See, the one percent done spent all the rent. / And now the rent’s due, so we’re coming to a tent near you. / We’re the like-minded ninety-nine percent / standing up to corruption with loving dissent.” Music blogger and culture hacker Wyatt Closs created something called Occupy Sound, which offers music to inspire and inform the movement. Volume One included Noam Chomsky, Pharrell, and Public Enemy. Occupy Design creates freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%.

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