At 8 a.m. on Monday, I turned up for work on time, but wasn’t needed. So with my morning unexpectedly unscheduled, I went strolling — shirt and tie — through downtown Phoenix.
Not wandering too long at all, I found my way to Caesar Chavez Plaza, a small bricked courtyard that’s the space between our several downtown courthouses.
The trappings of occupation were difficult to miss — stacks of signs, tents, and from the courthouse steps not 100 feet away, a blaring megaphone.
It was a space set up for many people, but with perhaps only a dozen manning tables at that early hour. They lounged about in the cool morning, like exhausted hosts after an all-night college party.
While walking, I heard a bearded 20-something man explain to someone through his laptop that though there aren’t “too many of us out right now,” the core group of protesters were “still going strong.”
I could only assume he was talking to someone in a similarly occupied location.
Like the others there that morning, he looked every bit the activist. Black t-shirt, weathered jeans and bandanas serving several different functions.
The infrastructure was impressive, with tents for every purpose. Rest tents for the weary, a water station for the thirsty and a first aid tent for wounded (hopefully a tent that stays unused).
But in the early morning quiet, Caesar Chavez Plaza had no movement. It had leaders waiting calmly, supplies stacked neatly under awnings, witty slogans glued to sticks and piled up high. Yet it was empty.
Since these occupations first kicked off, politicians and other bystanders have been disdainful. Without a message, they insist, this is no “movement.”
But it turns out, there’s no movement without people. Monday morning, there were messages to spare.
That’s always true. For any movement, there’s a message and a vanguard; half a dozen young men and a pile of pithy slogans. Those are the easy parts.
The passion is the hard part – making ordinary people stop and care. And for that one reason, these protests matter big time.
Like the European riots or the Middle-East revolts, this Occupy movement has been guttural, and unrefined. It’s anger, boiling over, at all the stubborn structures of this world that do not work.
To dismiss this for deficiencies in form is a mistake. The rage we’ve seen this year is what’s been lacking in the well-framed movements of our last impotent decade. And it’s a rage that won’t just die without concessions.
Because the angry, it turns out, are also many.
On my way out of the park I passed a woman — maybe girl — with a purple mat, hawking “free yoga.”
Her big handwritten sign, which read, “Freedom is meaningless without opportunity,” immediately struck me as that “best” Occupy sign every news outlet is seeking.
There are professions, institutions, even causes for us all to join. But they’re not the ones we want. Three years ago our system nearly fell apart completely, and during reassembly we’ve changed nothing of importance.
So now public space is occupied, reclaimed by our displaced for other uses. And their one demand?
Make room.
Reach the columnist at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.