Occupy: Imagine Power to the People

Politics for Joe
October 17, 2011
By: Hubert O’Hearn
For: Lake Superior News

Occupy Part 4: Imagine Power to the People


When I was directing live theatre, which I did for the better part of a decade after swearing off politics (and believe me, there was a fair bit of swearing involved), what I would wait for is the ‘Aha! Moment’. You could see it physically happen to an actor. It was in their eyes, their body, and their voice. Suddenly the play and the character stopped being objective things that were being learnt by rote and embodied by a series of repeated moves and vocal inflections. Instead, the experience burst into the subjective. A life was being explored on-stage. If you could bottle that electric charge, that moment, you’d make billions.

I had my Aha! Moment regarding the Occupy Movement in the wee small hours last night. A friend of mine, Tammy Lee Marche, a professional communications consultant based out of London Ontario, attended the Occupy Toronto event on October 15. Tammy’s an all-around good egg who has dedicated her business, BullMarket Consulting Limited, to building community consensus that will advance the cause of the disadvantaged: unemployed youth, Aboriginals, and Women’s Health in particular. Anyway, Tammy wrote a short blog entry on her website (http://tammyleemarche.com/) explaining why she marched in the Occupy Toronto protest. I invite you to read it. Trust me, it won’t take long. I quote the second paragraph:

I believe that over the last 15 years, a consciousness evolution has taken place very rapidly on earth, and as a result, we are in the midst of a consciousness revolution, a revolution that no longer depends on the mind or logic for answers to our global, national, local and individual problems.  It is a movement that relies on the heart of the people and the collective heart for answers.

That and the rest of her posting changed the way I view Occupy. As should be shriekingly obvious to anyone who has been reading either this series or much of my recent newspaper work, I not only support Occupy, I want to hug it and give it a tender kiss. I now know what the Movement is, what it can be, and these remaining columns can now take on amuch more specific (and I hope helpful) focus. Curious? Read on.

What are the principal criticisms of Occupy as blathered and burped by pundits and politicians on Big Media? A list:

• Occupy has no agenda.
• Occupy is unfocused
• Occupy is leaderless
• Occupy mistrusts politics
• Occupy has no ‘go forward’ strategy

A short response to all of the above:

• Good
• Better
• Thank God
• Wouldn’t you?
• Wait for it

I had been trying to put my finger on what the Occupy Movement actually Is. Analysis by myself and others, in both Big Media and limited reach commentators has been - for want of a better word - Vulcan in nature. What are the specific demands and what are the specific policies demanded and what is the inner logic driving these events?

But these are not Vulcan events. They are human - emotional and instinctive. There is a sense that Things are Not Going Well; an impending sense of doom similar to villagers seeing the long-dormant volcano start to smoulder, or the big grey line of a Tsunamai appear on the ocean’s horizon. And what do people do when those sorts of natural disasters announce themselves? They do two things: they run like hell in the same direction, then huddle together for comfort and mutual support.

Maybe these ARE Vulcan events...

That is the Occupy Movement. That is why it seems so spontaneous. That is why it has spread so quickly across cities, nations and continents.

The world is either broken or is breaking. Its peoples have seen the reports and have felt the personal effects of climate change, a financial system kept together with chewing gum and bailing wire, famine in a time of great wealth, the depletion of easily available carbon energy, health care systems that cover the wealthy but not the poor, unemployment, under-employment, the trampling of organized labour, outsourcing of jobs, and the dominance of money in democratic politics. That’s just a start.

Samuel Johnson said of the guillotine, ‘It concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ One can think of little else when the moment comes than the guillotine, volcano or tidal wave. The only exceptional quality of the guillotine is that executions happen one at a time (although give Texas half a chance...) whereas natural disasters or the world disaster just described happen to lots and lots of people at once.

And thank heavens for it. This has created the run like hell/huddle together response in all these parks, streets and civic squares.

Now here’s the nut, the Aha! Moment.

It’s not about reform.

It’s not about tweaking, modifying or legislating. Incremental change has been tried, abandoned, and tried again; yet the world remains broken. It becomes that classic definition if insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

Instead, Occupy is about form, not reform.

It is about instinct, not logic.

It is about - yes- Imagine.

The collective memory of John Lennon’s solo work is dominated by Imagine. Rightly so, I guess. It is a beautiful song that calms the soul and releases the mind into dreams of what could be. I suggest to you that the ‘B side’ for October 2011 should be another of Lennon’s solo songs - his rabble rousing ‘Power to the People’. See


This is why Occupy sometimes seems amoeba-like and formless. It is the world’s biggest focus group that has come together (another good Lennon song) to imagine the world it would like to see.

What should an ideal banking system look like?
Where should energy in the future come from?
What do we want our lives to feel like?

I said to a friend the other day, half in jest, that the 1% or as I prefer to term it, The Power should just offer all the Occupiers a huge tract of land like Madagascar and let us just go about our business of creating a nation that would be sustainable and address needs before wants. A new and secular Israel, is you will. Now that still wouldn’t work, because climate change in particular knows no national boundaries. Instead, the job of the Occupiers is to create a new world. From scratch. From heart. From love. From feelings and all those messy human emotions.

Just imagine power to the people. Power to the people? Right on.

Be seeing you.