Occupy might just be the name we've put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn't exist and mostly want to work outside the system. If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront -- and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.
Anyway. I've been kind of harsh in my condemnation of window breaking as philosophy. I want a nonviolent movement and I want us to be clear about it. But I think she goes some distance to framing the matter well. It wasn't a deep piece, particularly, but I agreed with pretty much all of it (not unusual, when I read Solnit -- I heard her in the mid aughts as I was driving down 19th between the 101 and 5 south through San Francisco, on my way to work, one of those intermintable daily drives, and she described how a person can be rich in loss. I was smitten, and have been since).
