Point Blank
In New York, thousands of people continue to occupy Zuccotti Park, setting up home base there in order to sustain—and even reinforce—their daily marches across the heart of global capitalism. The demonstrators, composed of a ragtag crowd of unemployed middle-aged men and women, seasoned hippie protesters, frustrated young adults mired in college debt, and impassioned socialists eager to turn their country around, have all succeeded in capturing the world’s attention.
It’s called “Occupy Wall Street,” aptly named in honor of the street that has had all too much say in our lives. The movement has now spawned similar protest actions all over the world—from London to Hong Kong, from Toronto to Tokyo.
Some commentators have noted that the whole movement seems to signal the revival of the American Left, after 40 years of deep slumber. That much was bound to happen, especially with the suffering the broad masses has had to endure due to the greed of New York’s wealthiest. The government’s bail-out of the people who count on their huge bonuses for a summer at Saint-Tropez doesn’t sit well with a populace surviving on food stamps and losing homes to foreclosure.
But one particularly interesting part of the protests lies in the slogan the movement has adopted: “We are the 99%.” If anything, the slogan is an affirmation of the movement’s origins: the 99% of the population who has had to bear the brunt of the richest 1%’s abuses. This rhetoric is not without significance; it speaks of a heightening class consciousness among Americans, of a growing realization that something is not entirely right in a capitalist system that demands government protection for the institutions that have been causing the most harm.
Understandably, it’s talk of matters like these that makes a lot of us uneasy, especially in our context. After all, Americans are still lucky to not have it as bad as our backwards feudal country does. Here in the Philippines, it’s still issues of class that serve as the language of the streets. It’s the language of the retrenched Philippine Airlines employees demanding fair and humane treatment from Lucio Tan and his business partners. It’s the language of the Hacienda Luisita farmers fighting to take back their land from the Cojuangco-Aquino landlords.
The crisis of the global capitalist system is making it clear that at one point or another, we Ateneans will have to make a choice: to be with the 99% or the 1%, to go down the hill or to remain in our comfortable Ivory Tower. Clearly, there’s no point in denying that most of us were born to the ruling class of society, but many Ateneans before have already shown that it is possible for us to transcend our bourgeois origins.
As contributors to a system that makes a lot of people’s lives miserable, we better start talking about where our true loyalties lie. In my column last month, an anonymous online commenter ended her long reply with this: “I saw this placard in the photos of the Wall Street takeover, saying ‘The day will come when the poor won’t be able to eat anything but the rich.’ We wouldn’t want that day to come; otherwise, it would be a pity to be in that Ivory Tower of yours.”
Touché.
