Earlier today I was on the 18 Line, travelling towards the SafeWay in Albany in order to consolidate my change jar into good old-fashioned cold and hard greenbacks, when the bus passed a group of demonstrators on Solano Boulevard. The demonstrators looked quite well to-do, by my estimation, mostly upper-middle class looking white folks, and they had all the requisite signs for demonstrators of the age, denouncing greed and the 1%, this that and the other. I pumped my fist in solidarity as the bus slid by.
In front of me, however, was a 40-something looking fellow who I had noticed was carrying a dolly with outside-sleeping gear – homeless? That was my guess. He was asking the bus-driver where these people were two, three hundred years ago when the wheels of capitalism began churning in earnest and essentially tsk-tsking the whole Occupy Movement. So I engaged him.
His idea was that “socialism, communism, capitalism,” had “all been tried” and found faulty. More importantly, he emphasized, it was not correct to begin one’s program simply by reacting to something being wrong. One should have a solution prior to resisting the problem. I challenged him on this point, and called into question the assumption that this was so – it’s certainly an effective model of control to convince one’s subjects that resistance prior to a fully articulated response to oppression was a bad idea. But mostly, he suffered from the “where were these people when” reaction, which is probably as prevalent “insta-skepticism” I mentioned in passing in my previous entry.
We were in the middle of our conversation when I had to get off the bus. I was lucky, however, for after the Coinstar machine took 9.8% of my 15 scrupulously saved dollars-worth of change (dropping my total from 15 something to 13 something), I again ran into him as I waited for the return bus. “Let’s pick our conversation back up” he suggested, and I conceded.
The problem, he said, and thus the starting point, was with education. My ears perked up as he outlined, in short, an analytic of what folks should learn in school. I took notes. “Where do we start? Where does one start, when one goes to school?” He kept asking. He outlined it for me, and told me to put this list under the heading “Things They Don’t Want You to Know.”
- Economics
- Constitutional Law
- Political Science
- Banking
These are the things they don’t teach you, he said, but what we should be forced to learn. And more importantly, the history of how these have come to form the reality in which we operate. “Taxes and the taxation system. How did Wall Street happen?” He said he’d asked students from Cal “where do you start?” and “what do you learn?” and what he deduced from their answers was the fact that “they force you to know how to feed the system” not how to critique it, how to alter it, how to be able to speak its language, or even how it functions.
He spoke of how Madison Avenue invented advertising, and he asked the question “Who determines what it is that you need?” and questioned the forced nation-wide transferal from analogue to digital television. And these kids with their iPods, iPads, iThis and iThat – well they “just got their whole house rigged with the shit the one percent make their money off of. “ Turning to me, he looked me in the eye and said “You can’t buy into what you are fighting against.” And he meant it. Of course, it could be argued that a homeless man will have it easier than your run-of-the-mill middle class student (ironically?) in this particular aspect of the struggle.
I told him how the Occupy Movement had been striving to approach issues of education through initiatives like the Open University at UC Berkeley and other places, and how his arguments and insights were valuable and pertinent, and that General Assemblies at any number of Occupations could use his in-put and energy. My bus stop was approaching, and so I didn’t get a chance to mention Althusser, Foucault or Paulo Freire, but did have enough time to get his number.
As I was getting off the bus he asked me where I worked. I told him that I was a grad student at Cal. It was a beautiful moment. Soon we’re going to get coffee, and maybe in the spring I can get him to come and help me fulfill my commitment to spend more time at Occupy Cal, and we can Occupy Together.
