Occupy Your Victories

Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary
By Rebecca Solnit via Tom's Dispatch

A positive, heartening piece.

Occupy Your Victories
Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary
By Rebecca Solnit

Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O’Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn’t much of a singer. One year into the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still in progress, catalyzed by the unknown secretary of the local NAACP chapter and a preacher from Atlanta -- by, that is, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Occupy, our bouncing baby, was born with such struggle and joy a year ago, and here we are, 12 long months later.

Occupy didn’t seem remarkable on September 17, 2011, and not a lot of people were looking at it when it was mostly young people heading for Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. But its most remarkable aspect turned out to be its staying power: it didn’t declare victory or defeat and go home. It decided it was home and settled in for two catalytic months.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175593/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_success_is_for_the_stubborn/