“Occupy”: A Taste like Pickled Herring?

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

The last time America tasted exciting, like pickled herring or deep deep chocolate ice cream, was in and after the 1960s.

Where were they going, all those unexpected flavors? The official leaders might call it craziness, but we knew there was a deeper sanity.

Craziness, we knew, was forcing Black folk to choose between strangling their own humanity or getting bombed or shot.

Craziness, we knew, was forcing young men to choose between risking their lives in an illegitimate war against the people of Vietnam, or risk years of prison to refuse.

Craziness was encouraging young women to shape a feminist world – except inside the synagogue or the church.

Craziness was thinking a grey flannel suit would fit everybody.

Craziness was a “university” that claimed to be creating knowledge, even wisdom, while actually doing advanced research on lethal chemical weapons. 

Craziness was deciding at age 6 which Americans should be “educated” to haul a pick and shovel, which to work on the auto assembly line, which to be high-school teachers controlled by a multiple-choice exam, and which to think blazing new ideas about the Universe.

These insights into craziness were existential. Basic. From them rose questions that seeded more than a dozen movements, intertwined into one Roaring Lion of a movement: Can we make America make sense? Human sense? 

Today,  young Americans find themselves in existential crises of their own.

For many of them, corporate-controlled America has become not the great escalator but a dead end: No job. Huge debts. Lost homes. Endless wars. 

The disemployment rate acting like a military draft—who will get a job, who that can’t get a job will have to kill,  be killed,  be maimed? 

Not just money-in-the bank questions, but sanity-in-the-soul questions. Is America itself as a spiritual vision, “governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” dying? Dead?  Does sitting in college classes make sense if the planet is suffocating?

So we get “Occupy Wall Street.” Not just in America, it turns out.  Yesterday, all around the world, thousands gathered. Frankfurt. Rome, Times Square. Tokyo. Sydney. 

It is certainly too soon to know whether the moment of “Occupy Wall Street” will seed the starburst of a new “Transformative America,” committed to healing ourselves and the world.

We’ll see. Or rather, we will decide. Will we make a difference? Will we overcome?

Over the next month or so, I will make some suggestions about transformative questions we might raise, rather than answers we might assert. 

Blessings of shalom, salaam, justice, healing— Arthur

Rabbi Waskow is the Director of the Shalom Center http://www.theshalomcenter.org/