Street, they slept outdoors while the weather held, chalking slogans about corporate greed on the concrete, refusing to leave, and when they got too noisy, too rowdy, the police swept in and dragged them away in ones and twos. A lot of them were runaways. Many of them were queer or transsexual: nineteen-year-old Rina, Envy and Franklin, young lovers who met in the Washington camp nine months ago; Little Sean from Philadelphia, curled in a crusty sleeping bag, his cornrows poking out, who burnt a dollar he really needed just to show me how much he hated money, and then told me how his parents kicked him out. Across the street, armed police took shifts to watch them sleep, occasionally charging in with cuffs and pointed guns to arrest them if they got too rowdy. These kids waited for it to get better. It didn’t.
Sometimes young people get sick of waiting for things to get better, and that’s when they start to fight back. Over two years of following the new student protests and Occupy protests in Britain, Europe and the United States, what struck me most profoundly is how these movements are driven by those same lost, vulnerable young people for whom the promise of a better future rotted with the recession. In the temporary refugee camps that sprung up in New York and London and Washington and Chicago, I met countless homeless runaways in their teens and early twenties. Interviewing them for article after article on the economic focus of the protests, I began to see patterns many mainstream journalists seemed to me to be ignoring on purpose, because they didn’t fit any neat story about dirty hippies or passionate anti-capitalist revolutionaries. The scars on arms and shoulders, the marks of knives and cigarettes on tender skin, some of them self-inflicted, some, I was told, anything but. The dirt under their fingernails. The excitement in their eyes at finding something to belong to, at finding love and acceptance after years of frustration and rejection.
So much of the Occupy movement, with its parades, its crazy costumes and its proud declarations of solidarity, was like a great big coming-out party. Across the world, storytelling was an enormous part of the uprisings of 2011. Against the single story of an individual striving towards, inevitably, prosperity that has dominated the past thirty years of political inheritance in the West, people offered their own stories, hard, raw stories of debt and disease and disappointment.
Talking about trauma is a queer activity in every sense, particularly for men, when it is forbidden unless you’re in a war movie. It allows us to reimagine the present. In the middle of a noisy demonstration on 17 November 2011, two days after the eviction of the first Occupy Camp at Zucotti Park, I saw something very special happen at the corner of Nassau and Pine in the Financial District. About two hundred people had gathered at the junction, pushed backwards by the police, and suddenly they began to step forward one by one and give impromptu speeches about how the American Dream had failed them. One was a schoolteacher who barely made her rent; another was a disabled parent struggling with no health insurance; a blue-collar worker whose home had been foreclosed; a young student facing lifelong education debts.
I arrived just after it began, and I have no idea if it was pre-planned, but everywhere people were nudging each other forwards, stepping into the circle that had formed to share their own small, hurting piece of the global economic crisis. To say that the stories were tragic would imply that they were somehow extraordinary, but this was ordinary suffering and everyday rage, the sort of feelings that Americans in particular are meant to feel ashamed about owning in public. As these people shared their stories – quickly, because the NYPD were approaching with plasticuffs and billy-clubs – there was a sense of elation, a relief in finally being able to be open about the
Sometimes young people get sick of waiting for things to get better, and that’s when they start to fight back. Over two years of following the new student protests and Occupy protests in Britain, Europe and the United States, what struck me most profoundly is how these movements are driven by those same lost, vulnerable young people for whom the promise of a better future rotted with the recession. In the temporary refugee camps that sprung up in New York and London and Washington and Chicago, I met countless homeless runaways in their teens and early twenties. Interviewing them for article after article on the economic focus of the protests, I began to see patterns many mainstream journalists seemed to me to be ignoring on purpose, because they didn’t fit any neat story about dirty hippies or passionate anti-capitalist revolutionaries. The scars on arms and shoulders, the marks of knives and cigarettes on tender skin, some of them self-inflicted, some, I was told, anything but. The dirt under their fingernails. The excitement in their eyes at finding something to belong to, at finding love and acceptance after years of frustration and rejection.
So much of the Occupy movement, with its parades, its crazy costumes and its proud declarations of solidarity, was like a great big coming-out party. Across the world, storytelling was an enormous part of the uprisings of 2011. Against the single story of an individual striving towards, inevitably, prosperity that has dominated the past thirty years of political inheritance in the West, people offered their own stories, hard, raw stories of debt and disease and disappointment.
Talking about trauma is a queer activity in every sense, particularly for men, when it is forbidden unless you’re in a war movie. It allows us to reimagine the present. In the middle of a noisy demonstration on 17 November 2011, two days after the eviction of the first Occupy Camp at Zucotti Park, I saw something very special happen at the corner of Nassau and Pine in the Financial District. About two hundred people had gathered at the junction, pushed backwards by the police, and suddenly they began to step forward one by one and give impromptu speeches about how the American Dream had failed them. One was a schoolteacher who barely made her rent; another was a disabled parent struggling with no health insurance; a blue-collar worker whose home had been foreclosed; a young student facing lifelong education debts.
I arrived just after it began, and I have no idea if it was pre-planned, but everywhere people were nudging each other forwards, stepping into the circle that had formed to share their own small, hurting piece of the global economic crisis. To say that the stories were tragic would imply that they were somehow extraordinary, but this was ordinary suffering and everyday rage, the sort of feelings that Americans in particular are meant to feel ashamed about owning in public. As these people shared their stories – quickly, because the NYPD were approaching with plasticuffs and billy-clubs – there was a sense of elation, a relief in finally being able to be open about the
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