Not so much.
Downtown Nashville.
Now there's a place I spent more than just a little time.
Either way, or either location...I get it.
More on that in a minute.
It’s morning at the Occupation.
Sarah Robey wakes up in a tent on the cold marble slab of Legislative Plaza, like she has every day for the past two weeks. Someone stole her laptop the other day, along with documents she was trying to send to an employer to start a new nursing job. Still, she says, her experience with Occupy Nashville has been “beautiful.”
Robert Dunn arrives for the breakfast shift, threading his way between tents and blanket-wrapped forms snoring under tarps. He sets out thermoses of hot coffee, aluminum trays of bagels and fruit, and whatever hot dish the volunteers might have dropped off.
“They think we’re up here smoking pot and having a party,” said Dunn, a retired engineer, waving a hand at the nearby government buildings and office towers. “But it’s like Archimedes said: Give me a lever and a place to stand and I’ll move the world. Our lever is public opinion.”
What public opinion will make of the 2-week-old Occupy Nashville movement remains to be seen.
“I don’t understand what they want,” said Diana Miller, watching in bemusement as protesters danced and waved signs with messages like “End Corporate Personhood” at theater patrons arriving for the Thursday performance of Wicked at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.
She shook her head, not interested in getting any closer to get an answer to her question.
You walk by the plaza and all you see are hand-lettered signs and spray-painted images of upraised fists, a cluster of tents and tarps, tables piled with pamphlets and an odd assortment of people wandering around.
You see the homeless, dozens of them, sleeping in rows against the walls, tucked against the fountains and planters. They were sleeping in the plaza long before Occupy Nashville came along, and the lure of friendly activists with supply tents full of food, bottled water, and warm blankets and clothes has drawn them in droves.
If you come closer, Occupy Nashville participants will be happy to answer your questions, and share the story of what brought them to the movement — job loss, foreclosure fears, crushing student loan debts or general unease about the growing role of money in politics.
What they can’t tell you is how long they’ll be out here. They say they’ll still be on the plaza when the legislature comes back to work in January. They say they believe that a few dozen people sleeping under the stars in the middle of Nashville might be able to make a difference in the world.
“Right now in the world, we’re seeing impossible things every day,” said Raymond Artis, who has camped out a few times on the plaza. “When I was in fourth grade, I used to think I’d never be president of the United States because I was black. Then Barack Obama got elected. ... I think more people will come (out to join the movement). Instead of wondering what Occupy Nashville is about, you should be asking yourself what you’re about.”
Robey, who lost her laptop but not her belief in the movement, is taking a stand for people like her mother, who worked hard all her life but now can’t afford health insurance and can’t afford to go back to school to retrain for a better job.
“There’s a collaboration that happens at night, when we’re drinking coffee and talking and it’s freezing and we’re getting rained on. It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everyone has a story. … We need more people to come up and tell us their stories.”
Occupy Nashville members — they stubbornly refuse to appoint leaders — are keenly aware of the image they project.
“We realize that it’s a fine line between an occupation and an eyesore,” joked Keven VanDenBrink, delivering a box of freshly laundered sleeping bags and clothes. He works nights as a bartender but tries to donate a few hours a day to volunteering, cooking or running errands for the occupiers.
Volunteers spend part of every day sweeping and picking up trash to keep the plaza looking presentable.
Homeless visitors are offered a broom or a poster and asked to take a turn waving signs at passing motorists. Volunteers, dubbed the “Good Vibe” patrol, circulate around the plaza, trying to defuse tensions and deter troublemakers.
The Thursday night Good Vibe volunteers included a wounded veteran who goes by “Country,” and his wife, Jennifer, a former volunteer firefighter who’s seven months pregnant. Country lost a brother in Afghanistan and caught three bullets himself. Now his benefits are being cut and he can’t qualify for disability assistance.
“You say you support the troops, show me you support the troops,” Country said. “I’ve done a lot for the 1 percent, and I feel like they haven’t done anything for me.”
Eva Watler, a massage therapist who has been camping out on the plaza almost since day one, had her BlackBerry stolen out of her pocket while she slept. But that hasn’t changed the reasons that drew her to the movement in the first place — as a self-employed entrepreneur, she can’t afford health insurance, and neither can her brother, who lost his job shortly before he was diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma.
“A lot of us have been waiting for this a long time. A lot of us have been working toward this for a very long time,” said Watler, who juggles her protest schedule with her appointments with clients.
Some evenings, she brings her massage table to the plaza and offers a free session to anyone who asks.
“I was able to give massages to people who had never received body work before. People who were in pain,” she said. It’s one of her favorite memories of the past two weeks.
Jesse Reichart of Lebanon is studying solar energy technology at Miller-Motte Technical College.
Today, he was dropping off a bag of warm winter clothes for Occupy Nashville participants. This weekend, he and his father are planning to come down and camp out. His father is one of the nation’s “long-term unemployed,” he said, and he’s worried about finding work once he graduates.
“We’re not all crazy lefto wackos,” he said.
First, not to split semantic hairs, but ghosts of English teachers past are volunteering me to respectfully, if irreverently, share with Mr. Reichart that calling yourself a "crazy wacko" is redundant.
Kind of like calling yourself a talentless Kardsashian.
Then again, those whose view of the political horizon comes strictly from the starboard side would probably have no problem calling their port side counterparts both crazy and wacko.
Sticks and stones.
Having sufficiently digressed, though...
Here's the thing.
One recurring theme throughout any and all media blathering about the "Occupy fill in the name of your favorite participant" is the apparent inability of the aforementioned media to determine the answer to the $64,000 question (1.2 million, adjusted for inflation.)
"...uh, what do they want?"
No one seems to know.
If any eyebrows arched, eyes rolling observer knows, they ain't sayin'.
And if any of those on the stand up and be counted side know, they are, admittedly, not doing much of a job of articulating their agenda.
I have a theory.
Imagine that.
I don't think there is an agenda.
Or, at the very least, a checklist.
At some point, or points, in every society's timeline, there are periods where the status quo reaches critical mass, when what is, is simply no longer acceptable or, more to the point, tolerable.
At that point, simple human nature demands that revolution begins.
And just like a novel destined to become classic, the ending is not always necessarily known, or even completely formulated, at the beginning.
In some measure, it's like the quote attributed to, among others, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle.
"...go as far as you can see...and when you get there, you'll see farther..."
Those who "occupy" are the latest wave of revolution, following, from my P.O.V, the birth of the Tea Party whose genesis was that same rejection of the status quo.
Whether there will be a next wave and another and another or whether the revolution will be put down by those who aren't ready to part with the status quo (think the British trying to keep the colonists down and substitute the greedy trying to keep the middle and lower class down)...
...only time will tell.
The pseudo intellectual circle jerk effort to determine "...uh, what do they want?" is, at worst, an exercise in futility.
And, at best, it is unnecessary.
Because it's the wrong question.
And the right question has an easy, and obvious, answer.
"...uh, what don't they want...?"
Any more of the same old shit.
Any longer.
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