occupy wall street

Culture

The Many, Not the Few: An Anthem for Occupy

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Makana weighed, in an instant, the pros and cons of pissing off the president and possibly torpedoing a flourishing career. Sure, he’s unlikely to be invited to entertain Obama and friends anytime soon, but no one’s dragged him by the hair to the ground, “nudged” him with a nightstick, or pepper sprayed him at close range. He’s certainly mindful of the difference between his stage and that of the protesters, but Makana sees the same spirit of aloha—a spirituality lost, like so many Hawai’ian protest songs, on many outsiders—as animating even angry dissent with love.

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Culture

#Occupy: A Deeper Form of Protest?

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Ours is primarily a linear society which rewards building, doing, improving, and growing. It’s no surprise, then, that countercultural movements have tended to emphasize circles: consensus rather than hierarchy, egalitarianism, nuanced notions of ‘progress.’ Does this sound familiar? It should—it’s behind a lot of what observers have noticed about the Occupy movement: that there are no clear goals, no policy prescriptions, no realistic (i.e., incremental) demands.

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Politics/Law

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

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Saturday’s surge of Occupy Wall Street-themed actions could be a turning point. There’s obviously more to be felt and said about this than any journalistic treatment could hope to engage; nonetheless, four RD contributors, moderated by Senior Editor Sarah Posner, shared their own thoughts about a movement that remains fluid and thrilling and quite literally indescribable.

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Culture

A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

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Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.

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