The "Occupy" Movement Before the Rising Tide: "Witnessing"

Terence Stone

The Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement are about social justice; but even before anybody seems ready to call for the specifics of change, we talk, reflect and find periods of stillness. It’s not inertia or lack of specific purpose that characterizes the Movement's activity at this time. The people who have mobilized are, at the same time as they are protesting, doing intuitively what functional cultures have done forever—"witnessing". The unspoken call to “witness”—to witness all we have become so wilfully blind to know—precedes the real rising of the tide.



What are the edges of injustices we’ve come to observe through a television screen or movie lens like a gunner through a gun-sight? What are the deeper injustices filtered by the media? What does it mean to really go beyond observing and grasp firmly the edges of knowing and hence understanding?

An economist and his investment-banker wife recently argued with me that the last 50 years has been the most peaceful period globally in the entire history of the human race. They both believed it, looking as they choose through the gun-sight of targeted profitability after the bombing is done.

It’s not easy—witnessing—when we’re out of the habit. In fact most of us have become downright cowards. I’ve found too often my own inclination to turn away, but decided to take my first lesson from eleven-year-old Avjit Halder who was born into, and raised in, a Calcutta brothel (Born into Brothels, 2003). He faces a haunting photograph of a veiled woman and addresses his Western entourage: “This is a good picture. We get a good sense of how these people live; and though there is sadness in it, and though it’s hard to face, we must look at it, because it is truth.” Raised in circumstances that would be difficult for us to imagine, this child, given the opportunity to turn away does exactly the opposite—he turns to face and "witness" what he sees,“because it is truth”.

Arundhati Roy who wrote the masterpiece, The God of Small Things, shunned the cushy life that fame and fortune could have brought her. Instead, she deliberately rejected it all in favour of agitating for justice in her beloved India. She has fought the abuses of Monsanto, GE, Enron, her own government’s occupation of Kashmir, displacement of the indigenous Adivasis and Dalits (untouchables, or “those who are broken”) because it was the right thing to do. The advice she gives in this time of blindness is first of all to ritually witness: “Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget”. (“The End of Imagination”).