John Steinbeck and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

In my days as a high school English teacher, one of my favourite books to teach was John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the story of dispossessed farmers who, due to drought and economic factors, are forced to leave their land behind and travel to California in the hope of starting a new life. That new life ultimately turns out to be one of terrible privation and exploitation as they seek work as migrant pickers, desperate to earn what little money they can to stave off complete starvation.

But beyond being a stinging indictment of an economic system that has stopped working for the people, the novel is ultimately a tale of strength and hope, informed as it is by the author's deep humanity and social conscience.

As I follow the Occupy Wall Street Movement, I find myself thinking of the things against which the movement is protesting, things that have, in fact, been part of the North American economic system for a very long time. But I also think of something else as well, a notion or concept that saves Steinbeck's novel from being a document in despair, a notion that I see very much alive in the people fuelling the Wall Street Movement.

First to the concept: Steinbeck believed in something called Manself which, while difficult to precisely define, is based on the notion that there is something within the human spirit, something we all share and are united by that propels us forward toward something beyond the status quo.

A quote from Chapter 14 (one of the intercalary chapters that breaks from the main narrative of the Joad family's struggles) of The Grapes of Wrath offers a useful demonstration:

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live- for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live – for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken.

And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

The above have always been powerful words for me, as Steinbeck articulates the strength of humanity, the willingness to live and die by principles and beliefs that are a threat to the powers-that-be. He tells us to fear the time the bombers stop dropping the bombs not because he is extolling warfare, but because he sees the use of armed repression as a powerful example of how threatened by the innate strength of humanity are those those who would control us, dictate the terms of our existence, and consign us to lives of misery if they can benefit from that misery.

Essentially he is telling us that whether or not our fight against injustice, evil, and inequity is successful in the short-term isn't the ultimate consideration. Rather, it is the fact that there are those among us who will fight, even if the odds are against them, who will suffer, even die, because their cause is just, that is the reminder of what we are and what we can be. It is, in fact, a strong repudiation of those who would have us believe that we are simply consumers of their goods, voters for their party, fodder for their economic empires.

It is this spirit of Manself, this defiance, this resilience, this refusal to any longer passively submit to a fate determined by the corporate agenda, to in fact confront it and work to defeat it, that I see in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

It is that thing the power elite, responsible for so much inequity, so much environmental destruction, so much suffering and despair, should be afraid of.