Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  We’re reaching and influencing them, the pompous plutocrats and overstuffed oligarchs, in countless ways, and they are responding in every imaginable fashion, from furiously striking out at troublemakers to keep a dying model in place, to occasionally making positive changes and forward thinking adjustments to how they operate. Many of us will be amazed to see how our past, present, and future actions have, do, and will continue to alter the course of history, just as a group of startled protesters discovered, once upon a time, way back in 1970, just days after National Guard troops killed four students on the Ohio Kent State campus during an anti–Vietnam War rally. Sometime around four thirty in the morning of May 9, President Richard Nixon approached a clutch of young people bedded down at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by his personal valet, Cuban immigrant Manolo Sanchez. In a bizarre chapter in history, the leader of the free world spontaneously decided to pay the campers an unannounced visit. From subsequent interviews with his former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, we know that Nixon felt the country was falling apart, which had thrown him into a tailspin, and put him in a delicate emotional state. He’d taken to obsessively calling Kissinger at all hours of the day and night, for guidance, comfort, and reassurance. Nixon later recalled this as “the darkest period of [his] presidency.” His version of the interaction with the kids was captured on tape as he dictated his recollection to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, shortly afterward, “… And I said I was sorry they had missed it because I had tried to explain in the press conference that my goals in Vietnam were the same as theirs—to stop the killing, to end the war, to bring peace. Our goal was not to get into Cambodia by what we were doing, but to get out of Vietnam. There seemed to be no—they did not respond. I hoped that their hatred of the war, which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country and everything that it stood for. I said, I know you, that probably most of you think I’m an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.” Until I read that quote from our former leader, I had no idea, and could barely imagine Richard Nixon giving a fig about what the country’s young people thought of him. Now, looking back, I can clearly see that the times they were a’ changin’.

  After my wheat crop is processed, I’m thinking about joining up with a growing legion of antifracking organizations who are assembling worldwide to put an end to the wasteful, planet-frying practice of extracting deeply embedded energy reserves through hydraulic fracturing of fossil fuel seams. If some other gigantic wave of activism doesn’t grab me first, I’ve got my eye on a group of anti-Keystone XL Pipeline fracktivists called The Cowboy/Indian Alliance, who are helping to unite and bolster resistance networks in both Canada and the US. Their motto is, “Reject and Protect,” and they’ve already pulled off several well-attended, high profile events. I admire what they’re doing and wonder if I could lend a hand with upcoming campaigns. They were all over the S22 Climate March on Sunday and it thrilled me to see their faces and hear their voices.

  Who knows where the journey that Occupy Wall Street started, will eventually lead me? I don’t, but I do know that the masses will eventually prevail, because we will not stop until we do. The one thing I am absolutely certain of is, I will never sit in my living room, do nothing, and be complacent again. Not only will we ultimately succeed in righting the ship, but in a sense, we already have. This revolution, as in all others, is won the moment We The Many recognize that the insults we’ve come to endure every day are far worse than anything the few can do to us. When that recognition reaches critical mass, as it invariably does, all the other pieces will fall into place. Hurled insults, or even tear gas canisters may discourage or slow us down, but we will keep coming. Neighbors looking askance at front yard vegetable gardens that have replaced sterile, weed-free lawns won’t kill anyone, but toxic turnips will, so plant and save heirloom seeds until Monsanto goes out of business. Register the poor and people of color in your area to vote. A revolutionary action as simple as moving money out of, “too big to fail” banks, with shameful foreclosure records, into smaller, community-oriented institutions, like credit unions, can be every bit as radical and effective as strapping on a gas mask and facing down a tank.

  And I say unto you this day, it is my firm belief that the Occupy Movement will be judged as a phenomenon of great moment in American history—a watershed occurrence that changed the course of events in ways we have yet to clearly understand. It changed the national conversation from far-flung esoteric exercises in irrelevance, to monumentally important discourse about the urgent crises we must solve as a nation and a planet, right now. It’s greatest achievement may someday be determined to have been to redirect the country’s focus onto real problems, hurting real people, real bad. However desperately we may want to define its significance and portent, we cannot even hope to do so for perhaps generations to come. I don’t know about that—but I do know that I believe what Mahatma Ghandi once said, and that is, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”