It is always dangerous to write something that could function as a putative “history” at a point in time close to the events being discussed. One lacks the perspective of time, and the information that future events provides to illuminate those events. The modern penchant for immediate analysis is good dialog but not necessarily conclusive analysis.
So it is with trepidation that I return to the Occupy movement and speculate on its importance. Not only is the movement of recent memory, but also it is an ongoing event; NPR reported this morning that Occupy is setting up an igloo encampment even now at Davos, in advance of the worldwide economic conference annually held there.
But I am almost compelled to do so if only because, in glancing out my window just now at the snow-coated grass plot that until recently was the Occupy Boston site, I see traced in the snow-cover, in block letters that must be 30 feet high, the word “LOVE” facing away from me, but directly at the Federal Reserve Bank. (I wonder if the City will come to erase the message before the polity is further polluted by such things.)
At the end of Occupy Boston I made bold to suggest that the residue of Occupy would, at a minimum, be a palpable contribution to the national dialog on who we are and what we ought to do about it. I think I was correct. Those who know me also know that I am not beneath an occasional “I told you so,” particularly since my being correct is such a random, rare event.
Last week’s Sunday New York Times ran a detailed article about locating the 1% and understanding what it took to find those people within our borders. The stunning (to me) graphic was a map of the United States made up of City names, and under each City the amount of earnings per year it took to be within the highest 1% of annual income.
The range was remarkable; over $900,000 on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, below $200,000 in some forelorn Cities (if I recall correctly, Jamestown New York and Flint Michigan). The high numbers were concentrated along our coasts (save Chicago). A rich man in Mississippi cannot ante in a poker game in Darien. While we cannot necessarily equate annual earnings to true wealth, the map gives us a clue that the country is not at all a unity, but rather a conglomeration of diverse localities that have fared very differently in the face of economic developments. There are numerous economies alive in the United States, perhaps something not surprising to affectionados of the House Hunter series on television (I am addicted, and I watch almost no other television; I love to see houses much nicer than mine being sold in Keokuk, Iowa for less money than it takes to maintain my lawn for a year in Newton.)
And this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal (Review section) again discussed America in Occupy terms. Author Charles Murray, writing a feature article extracted from his upcoming book on wealth disparity in our country, tracks fifty year trends in our collective perceptions of who we are as a country in a piece entitled “The New American Divide.” Expressly noting Occupy, and beginning his article with the words “America is coming apart,” Murray chronicles the division among Americans that is partially financial and partially social. He notes that we have not only differences in wealth, but also cultural differences in what we eat, how we get educated, whether we marry or pray, whether we have children of unmarried women, whether we are working or idle, all based on fundamental differences between our world views.
I look forward to the January 31 publication date of the book, entitled “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which analyzes, prototypically, the upper middle class town of Belmont, MA and the depressed Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA.
Differences in economics over time drive differences in culture in a way never before experienced here. Occupy gave voice to these differences. In a way, Murray’s analysis answers the question raised by many as to what the message of Occupy really was, or the criticism that the message was so garbled as to be meaningless. Occupy reflected the wide panoply of differences on many issues that reflect the division of America along deep cultural lines. Money is a leading cause and indicator of that division, but all the ancillary complaints and causes espoused at Occupy really were of a single cloth: different aspects of the two countries we have become.
Murray’s suggestion to bridge this gap is for the “new upper class” to engage themselves and their families in breaking down the cultural isolation. I am not quite sure what he has in mind, and must await the book to learn more, but it doesn’t sound so different from applying the big block letters in the snow visible outside my window, left anonymously by some prophet of cultural detente.