When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

May Day

"This is just disgraceful, carrying on like this here!" 

He was wearing a beige or cream suit, his hair was fair, his eyes may have been blue. He stood a little taller than me, and was gaunt and skinny like me. His complexion was good but starting to show the strain of one two many nights working late at the office.

I answered him directly from a place of peace.

"Please, these people are here because they care deeply about the world."

And his whole countenance changed completely. He'd come down from his office to vent his anger, to pick a fight, to expel some of the moral outrage that every Londoner carrys around bottled up inside all day. But my reply, unexpectedly calm and gracious had caught him off guard. He apologised and withdrew with the look of someone who had just realised something profound. 

It was May Day and Occupy London was back for a reunion. Paternoster Square, the original target of the St Paul's Occupation, site of the London Stock Exchange, now full of our rage and rebellion. 

Orange light flooded the square, a few tents had gone up like beacons. Texts, tweets, facebook posts and emails were being frantically sent by some, while others drank beer, and one brave or foolish man climbed the plinth in the centre of the square. 

It happens easily in England that everyone is so angry that they do not know who to direct that anger at, so during the entire course of Occupy and on that May Day in Paternoster Square we often had to deal with torrents of abuse from passers by who had read something or other about us in the papers, about everyone being a heroin addict, or everyone being white and middle class, or everyone being brown and foreign, or living in a mansion, or drinking Starbucks coffee, etc... Somehow, all at the same time. 

So when the man in the beige suit came along and saw the happening going on in the square, he felt entirely justified in having a go at us, knowing who we were and what we were doing there. He may have blamed us for not having more answers than we did. He may have blamed us for trying to fix something that others had long ago stopped trying to fix, having resigned themselves to absurdity, corruption and injustice. 

The London Stock Exchange loomed over us, a couple of tents in the entranceway. Being a bland building of concrete and glass it contrived to look neither guilty nor innocent of the crimes committed in its name.

Lest we forget I shall name those crimes again. Firstly, crashing the world economy with loans that should never have been made, to people who could never afford to pay them back and accepting bailouts to the tune of trillions, thereby impoverishing our social services. As a result pushing millions to the brink of desperation and then right over the edge; every family whose house was reposessed, every disability claimant who starved or committed suicide, every homeless man and woman who died of exposure in streets full of empty homes. Then there are the PFI scandles, the inside trading, the pensions crises, the interest rate fixing, the privatisation deals and the billions of unpaid taxes. Then there are the lies, the manipulations, the media control and the replacement of our democratic freedoms with corporate hegemony. And I could go on.  

The paper trail always seemed to end up here, or in New York, with thousands of overcaffeinated men in suits shouting out 'buy and sell' followed by enormous numbers, then terms known only to them and a few others, the names of financial instruments, that to the rabble in the square below look like nothing more than black magic, responsible, in some palpable way for their lives of poverty and exclusion. 

Most of us had been up since 5 and I hadn't slept at all. The night had been spent making the banner and tying little messages from the Occupy movement onto thousands of flowers.