This past week my spouse sent me an interesting item from The Independent about life in Greece in the wake of their financial catastrophe:
While politicians decide the fate of the eurozone’s most stricken economy, the people are being forced to turn back the clock to make ends meet. Patrick Cockburn reports from Naxos
“People are coming back to farms around here that they abandoned years ago so they can grow potatoes, cabbages and vegetables to help them survive the crisis,” says Petros Citouzouris, as he pruned his vines high in the mountains of Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades.
This is really one of the more colorful examples of what is happening all over the world, either by compelling circumstances or by those who see the proverbial water rising. People are changing the way they live, forming new kinds of communities and in many cases even different family arrangements. While the Greeks who are going back to the plow probably don’t see things this way, I think this is a healthy thing that could help them form a more robust way of living.
John Brunner was a science fiction writer who wrote penetrating and even prophetic stories and novels about our society and where it was headed. One of the best was his novel, The Shockwave Rider.  One of the more memorable “characters” in the novel is a small town in California called Precipice. In the novel, an earthquake, the “Big One” has devastated the state, and the government shows muted interest in rebuilding (rather like New Orleans). This same government is dominated by corporations, feckless, mired in partisanship, and the society supporting it is shallow and narcissistic. A few towns spring up out of the rubble, but Precipice is unique in that they carefully evaluate what is wrong with current society, and rebuild based on what amounts to a radical rejection of how things are supposed to be. And they thrive, which the Establishment simply can’t tolerate. It’s a good read for these times.
Now let’s look at OWS. By all objective accounts, this place a model community. It is efficient, sanitary to the point of point of obsession, orderly (except when the cops misbehave) with a well-functioning government. You can get free food, some limited medical care, browse their library, listen to live music and passionate speakers, and stay the night. And for the 1% and their misguided supporters, that’s a problem.
The problem is that in the course of staging their revolt, OWS is demonstrating that a bunch of young unemployed kids can build a fair, vibrant, and functioning society more easily than those in the glass towers looking down on them. And I don’t really see any reason why what they are doing can’t be scaled up, at least to the larger community level.
Detractors might point out that the OWS protesters are getting a free ride from fellow travelers who are sending food, medical supplies, money, clothing, etc., leaving aside the fact that the protesters are living in open and sleeping in tents with winter coming on. But if you want to talk about handouts, it would be intellectually dishonest to ignore the recent report of the General Accounting Office (GAO Report No. GAO-11-696, page 131) wherein we learn that the Government paid banks 16 trillion dollars. Just to give you a sense of scale, according to the US National Debt Clock, our National Debt stands at 14.86 Trillion. In other words, the money handed to the banks could have paid off the entire national debt with over a trillion to spare. Talk about handouts!
And for all intents and purposes, that money has disappeared. Those of us who footed that enormous bill do not see any jobs being created or any other significant easing of the economic picture for the rest of us.
This is why OWS is in many ways a serious threat to the narrative of Wall Street, that the fat cats know best how to run things. The community in Zucotti Park and in hundreds of other places across the nation are presenting us all with genuine, efficient, effective grassroots alternatives that shut the predatory banks and corporations out of the picture. Resistance to OWS is going to stiffen. Count on it. But I think this is too good to fail.
