Despite the headline, I am not writing, today, about a useful tool for your home improvement projects. But maybe I am talking about improving our politics.
The picture above adorns the online version of a column in the September 2026, edition of The Nation magazine. Written by Yotam Marom, the column is titled as follows in its online version: "How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today." It's worth reading! Best I can tell, from reviewing the personal webpage linked above, Marom is a consultant you can hire if you and your group want to be more politically impactful than you'd likely be without some experienced advisor helping you along.
For REALLY "old timer" Santa Cruz folks, you may remember "Operation Wilder." Operation Wilder was the very effective local political group that helped save Wilder Ranch. It was comprised of a bunch of dedicated but largely inexperienced local folks concerned about saving the North Coast, and stopping a proposed development that all by itself would have doubled the population of the City at that time, had that proposed development been approved. What did those in Operation Wilder know about politics when they got together? Well, I don't know, but they did make use of a paid political consultant to help them achieve their objectives. Shirley Zimmerman was her name - and thank you, Shirley! She did a pretty good job! I have no idea whatever happened to her, and an online search for her name turned up a lot of obituaries that don't seem to relate to the Shirley Zimmerman who had such a big impact on our local community.
Back to the article in The Nation. As I say, I recommend reading the entire article, which I hope even non-subscribers will be able to do. Here, though, are some excerpts from that article that contain the statements that have prompted this blog posting (emphasis added):
Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street shook the world. Sparked by people’s anger at the banks that caused the Great Recession and their disappointment with President Obama’s response, and inspired by a wave of pro-democracy movements from Greece to Spain to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the occupation soon became a whole little world of its own, with hundreds of people camping out and many more spending their days there...
The movement reintroduced class struggle into the mainstream narrative as the “99 percent versus the 1 percent," politicized and trained an entire generation of activists, and led to dozens of new organizations and campaigns...
But Occupy itself was short-lived. Two months after it began, police in cities all over the country raided the occupations and arrested their inhabitants. This was, perhaps, the way it was always going to end: The power of the militarized state far outweighed the power of a burgeoning social movement. But ... Occupy’s collapse was also the product of avoidable mistakes, internal weaknesses, and unhealthy tendencies in the movement. Those stemmed in large part from what I have called the “politics of powerlessness,” a set of ideas and behaviors that fetishize being the righteous underdog, turning movements away from their public and the broader task and inward toward each other...
Movements must actually want power. At Occupy, the politics of powerlessness took the form of tearing down leaders, refusing to articulate real-world demands or craft a strategy, and engaging in paranoia about being co-opted by liberals and unions. Many other movements and organizations suffer from similar dysfunctions: an insistence on being right over being effective; an obsession with maintaining the boundaries of the movement as though it were a club rather than a vehicle for mass change; an unwillingness to make hard choices that lead to good strategy. Movements must be willing to make sacrifices to get power and build the kinds of structures and processes needed to seize it and wield it.
Movements must combat despair. It is understandable to feel that the world we deserve is out of reach. But despair keeps us home, closes doors, kills movements—and what’s more, it doesn’t reflect the truth: We actually don’t know what’s possible. Occupy itself is proof of this. Mere moments before Occupy began, many of us didn’t really expect it to work. And then it did, at least in some ways, and here we are, 15 years later, tracing the impacts that are still unfolding around us.
One way to think about the Occupy movement is to classify it as a "Power Drill," an effort to test out possible avenues for economic, social, and political change.
One lesson should be clear from the Occupy effort, as outlined in Marom's telling in The Nation. "Movements must actually want power." That means, to recite what the patriots who brought our nation into being said, that we must be willing to devote to the effort "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
You can check the veracity of that quotation, yourself, by clicking this link to the Declaration of Independence. It's still relevant after 250 years!
Image Credit:
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/occupy-wall-street-anniversary-social-movements/
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