All social move­ments in the U.S. are betrayed every day not only by police (includ­ing cam­pus secu­rity) but by pas­sive observers. The off­spring of the peo­ple who watched fire hoses turned on peace­ful pro­tes­tors in Selma—and I am among them—now watch with the same muf­fled hor­ror as the line of sit­ting peo­ple, linked arm to arm, bowed their heads while cam­pus secu­rity, with casual aim­less­ness, doused them repeat­edly with pep­per spray. Seeing this clip, I was aston­ished by the casu­al­ness of the officer’s arm ges­ture, as though he was water­ing his porch geraniums.

Who autho­rized it?

Who ordered it?

Or per­haps there was no need of an order, for once these men are armed with pep­per spray, the order to use it is auto­matic. The same argu­ment holds for the omi­nous and end­less spread of nuclear weapons: if a nation has them, it will even­tu­ally use them.

Meanwhile, what we used to call the main­stream press con­tin­ues to ignore or belit­tle the pro­test­ers, as though they are slightly trou­ble­some bands of mos­qui­toes that will buzz off with cold weather.

Our obliv­i­ous­ness as spec­ta­tors and the counter mea­sures of author­ity will not pre­vail in the end. The nation’s sense of griev­ance is pro­found, and it is shared, even by those parked per­ma­nently on the side­lines. This is the griev­ance that the Tea Party tried in its ham-handed way to express; it is the griev­ance that all entrenched power sys­tems, whether Republican or Democrat, lib­eral or con­ser­v­a­tive, ignore, or com­bat, tediously and fruit­lessly, with beat­ings, arrests and pep­per spray.

Injustice in all its forms.

And there are other examples.

As a fem­i­nist from the day of my birth, I began to hope, in the sev­en­ties, that as women slowly rose on the social rungs, mak­ing a lit­tle more money (now 77 cents to the male dol­lar, for com­pa­ra­ble work), elected to state office, sit­ting in mea­ger num­bers on the boards of cor­po­ra­tions, we would all see benef­i­cent changes: more con­cern for those left out—are we not known for our compassion?—more resis­tance to war—have we not always objected to the slaugh­ter of the young?—more sup­port if not active involve­ment in the com­pli­cated machin­ery of change.

None of this has happened.

Today I read of a woman pep­per spray­ing a crowd of shop­pers at a California Wal-Mart so she could grab the newest ver­sion of the Xbox. Pepper spray, screams, a stam­pede in which twenty peo­ple, prob­a­bly all women, were hurt.

Is this the face we women are offer­ing to the world—a face dis­torted by greed and des­per­a­tion? In our econ­omy, this shop­per, with or with­out pep­per spray, is as essen­tial as the newest breed of bomber. We don’t so much hold up half the sky (the title of a California exhibit of work by women) as hold up half or more than half of the func­tion­ing, grind­ing machin­ery of capitalism.

In an econ­omy of high unem­ploy­ment, depen­dent on five per­cent annual growth, the woman spray­ing her fel­low shop­pers joins the ranks of the immi­grant shat­ter­ing the peace of a neigh­bor­hood with a leaf blower and the bull­dozer beep­ing as it destroys a hill­side for another expen­sive development.

Consumerism as empow­er­ment; destruc­tion as a national necessity.

I won­der what the woman with the pep­per spray felt when she took her prize home, unwrapped it, and began to glory in its new abil­i­ties: prob­a­bly sat­is­fac­tion, the same sat­is­fac­tion a bomber pilot feels when he elim­i­nates a group of hur­ry­ing dots that turns out to be human beings.

But this is Thanksgiving, when no one gives thanks, or rather its cursed after­math. Seeking a lit­tle hope, I remem­ber the num­ber of fathers I’ve seen this week­end, tot­ing or push­ing chil­dren on the streets of Los Angeles, behind swings in the play­ground, wip­ing noses, untan­gling toys, pre­sid­ing over disputes.

When I began, there were no fathers to be seen in such surroundings.

It seems a slim hope, and a strange one: that these men, newly lib­er­ated into con­scious­ness, will con­tinue the rev­o­lu­tion we women have betrayed.

For more on this topic, I rec­om­mend Black Friday Is Like Occupy Wall Street by Lee Siegel on The Daily Beast.

Tagged as: Occupy Wall Street, papper Spray, Wal-Mart, Xbox

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