Ten Years Since Occupy and the Need Is Higher Than Ever
Occupy Greensboro was packing up. Tents were taken down, cooking pots stacked, banners folded. I loaded a number of large white boards into the back of my hatchback. The white boards felt precious — the scribbly, blue-marker handwriting was archival evidence of a community coming together, brainstorming, planning, asking questions to dig deep, to wonder: What is wrong here?
Ten years ago, Occupy Greensboro emerged among more than 900 similar occupations across the United States and around the world. Many of those encampments outlasted the original on Wall Street by months, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into a loose movement around a rallying call against the 1%.
For me, Occupy was a revelation. I was a single mother of a 4-year-old, working a university job but pulling a salary that placed me barely above the minimum wage. Occupy signified a shift from a world that told me that my struggles were mine alone to an understanding that the system was just plain rigged.
Productivity had long been rising in the United States, but wages had been stagnant for decades. The cost of living had dramatically increased, however, and social services had been dramatically slashed. None of this was the result of natural processes, nor was it a series of mistakes or even the outcome of negligence…
