Resolution Grade

Earlier this year, I wrote some resolutions, and since I'm outta time, the moment has arrived to see whether I lived up to them. Realizing that I cannot remember what they were, there's a sense of doom, that they were just another resolution-grade list of things that never came to be.


Cut Back on Coffee. This one's easy. I was being facetious, since I'd just gotten an espresso maker and could cut the volume without decreasing caffeine, so this one doesn't count. If I got a grade, though, it would be bad, since I drink as much as ever and have lapsed on the espresso making. The only saving grace is that I kick in an extra buck every month at the work coffee club.
Grade: D-


Do it Myself. Again, not so good. I gushed all sorts of stuff about producing a meaningful amount of my own food and riding my bike, but didn't get farther than increasing how much produce I can and pickle. On the other hand, I did grow and preserve more than last year, built some things that could have been bought, and did a little bit of work on the truck.
Grade: C

Be a Thorn. The implied ending to this resolution was "in the side of The Man." This was more unusual before Occupy. And I did write letters, protest, donate money to an organization or two, and engage in some armchair activism whose ineffectiveness may fall short of pointlessness in the long search afterlife blog blog posts. I definitely could have done more, but at least this one is un-tinged with shame.
Grade: B

Spread the Love. Ask the ones who I love, and you'll find mixed success here. I did make a point of saying good things where in the past silence would have reigned.
Grade: B-

Stop Procrastinating. That depends on which aspect of my life is being considered. Some intentions remain mirages on a horizon. Others, I've made progress. Also, I have to admit to being half-hearted about this, because of course I am a pro crastinator, and enjoy drawing out certain things. 
Grade: INCOMPLETE

Follow Through. Part of this grade is a judgement on fulfillment of the above, and on that it looks like maybe just on the plus side of mediocre. In the bigger picture, I'd like to say the situation is different, but it ain't. I get credit for merely entering this post.
Grade: C++

There we have it, a mixed bag, a shapeless blob of a record. The average is a C or so. By completing anything I have risen above the pack, or at least  onto the plus side of the normal distribution, and so grading on a curve, I benefit by a full letter grade. Once again, failing less badly than others is enough to shine in America. 

Final Grade: B

Card Carrying Member of KAOS

I written about radio before, and am starting to suspect that it's going to be an altar in the temple of my curmudgeonhood. At the coming of aural autonomy, my preference was cassettes, probably because they let me record other peoples' music (piracy was more labor intensive in those days, but for every hardcore 7-inch 33, there were an ungodly number of cassette copies), and because radio offerings sucked at the time.


Now, that's different. Partly because the same social outcasts' flat out refusal to be told No led to a wave of low power stations, many of which fizzled, but enough of which survived to get their DNA on the air, where it has replicated ever since. The airwaves of 1980s Virginia, badly infected with commercials or stuck in chronic classical, are banished to space, where aliens hearing them may decide that there are no signs of intelligent life.


Living in Olympia and working statewide, the radioscape around me offers not just a pretty diverse genus of public stations, but community operated broadcasts. From Spokane to Skagit, on down the road through Everett, Seattle, Olympia and Portland, volunteers give voice to their place. People playing things you'll never hear elsewhere, people getting a chance to express or explore something that matters mostly in that small patch of earth. To have a station that adds diversity to their community invigorates culture and Culture. 

The local identity and grass-roots operation of most community stations are also, I think, important for democracy. Radio broadcasts reach people beyond wi-fi hubs and fiber umbilicals. Transmitters not owned by Clear Channel can air views unfettered by corporate mores. And if the time comes, know that the revolution will be televised, but only in between commercials, and you'll get better news on the radio. Oddly, the elder media spent much time this Arab Spring fawning on the democracy facebook and youtube, but radio remains and effective and cheap tool for freedom lovers.


Not free, though. Which is why I am a member at KAOS, Olympia community radio. Because it's not just that the call letters are hands down the best in the nation (sorry, KBOO), or the discounts kicked back at me from local bidnesses--I really do want to make sure community radio stays on the air.


KAOS brings us Democracy Now and other shows that would not be broadcast otherwise. They have not just Native News, but a great 4 hour block of native programming on Sundays; is there another station like that? And I cannot count the number of times I've cooked dinner listening happily to View from the Shore or Chant Down Babylon. The last thing I hear driving away from Olympia is usually static-scratched Amy Goodman. I tune in at random other times and get introduced to music from around the world, some of it so new it's live, but some harvested in the early days, most of it efficacious and restorative. 


So yes, I am proud to be a Card Carrying Member of KAOS. Are you?

Taking Out the Garbage

 

A few weeks ago, the city dropped off the new trash can. Last year, some rats chewed a hole in the bottom of one, set up house, and were eventually relocated to the landfill. Maybe we called about it, or maybe it was just garbage can replacement week, but in any case, now there's this snazzy new receptacle that says I have a Waste Wise Home. I am wise about so few things that this makes me puff up with pride. 

But alas, I am a data junkie and a skeptic, so I have trouble accepting accolades without knowing I've earned them. A quick look on garbage day confirmed that for a block in either direction, there are only two or three of these little trash cans, so maybe I am generating less trash than a typical neighbor. (Rolling the tiny trash can back down to the house, my burgeoning sense of pride made up the difference in volume.)

I don't have reliable figures for how much garbage my neighbors produce, and I don't feel like going down the road with a scale to find out for sure, but the EPA reports that nationally, 4.3 pounds per person per day is the average. We Americans apparently make more trash than actual products. We may be the value-subtracted champions of the world. 

But compared to 30 years ago, we at least recycle more, an average of 34%, say EPA figures. This means that the average person only produces 2.9 pounds of outright garbage every day. More or less what we threw out 30 years ago, as it turns out, so we seem to have increased junk production to keep pace with the recycling fad.

I don't know how big or small a pile 2.9 pounds of garbage is, and estimates in the weight/volume conversion game vary. New Mexico cites a hefty 225 pounds per cubic yard, King County (where Seattle lives) lists 177 pounds per yard, and Honolulu a mere 100 pounds (ah...I remember the lighter garbage of the tropics). My Waste Wise can holds 20 gallons, which is about a tenth of the 202 gallons contained in a cubic yard, so a full load equals somewhere between 10 and 22.5 pounds.

Sounds hefty, but four people live in this house, and garbage pick-up happens bi-weekly, which means the weight of the full can must be divided by 56 to yield pounds/person/day. Run those numbers, and you get somewhere between 0.18 and 0.4 pounds/person/day. This is about 10% of the alleged average output. I have a little bit of a smug grin right now. 

How is it that my family can be an order of magnitude lower than average? A big factor is that we compost almost all of our food waste. Other than occasional fowl bones, it all goes out to the back corner the microbes and possum buffet. 

Another factor is what we remove from the garbage portion of our waste stream. Our recycling bin is about twice the volume of the trash can, and although I have no figures, the percentage that is recycled--by weight or volume--has to be well over 50%. The table below (also from EPA) shows paper, glass, metal, and plastics amounting to 54.5% of total output. Except for a small portion of plastic that is not recyclable, almost all of the weight in these categories gets recycled around here. 

Of the remaining categories, there are a few that never make it into a trash or recycling container. Olympia offers food and yard waste recycling, but I covet my biomass, and either compost it or feed it to the wild-ish area in back under the alders. Wood? I cannot remember there being an occasion for wood to be thrown out; trimmings and windfall stay in the yard (the occasional larger alder ends up as embers under salmon), old furniture ends up being sold or donated, and leftover lumber from projects either gets stashed for future smaller projects, or turned into kindling. Leather, rubber and textiles? Pretty unusual for them to reach the discard pile. 

What's left is mostly plastic. The un-recyclable lids of containers, plastic-coated paper, and packaging. Some of what any modern American brings into their house inevitably ends up as garbage. Lots of packaging has no secondary use. There are things that will never qualify as hand-me-downs. The best way to deal with these is just to avoid bringing them into the house in the first place. Minimal packaging is a criterion when I shop. By growing some of my own food, I eliminate a bit more, and one of the benefits of canning is that those jars can last forever (take it from an archaeologist), and each time I use one that's one less can inthe recycling bin. I really should start making beer again, so I can pull the same trick with bottles...yeah, that's it, making beer is good for the environment. 

So, that's the lowdown on garbage production at this residence. Well below average, but it does not take much effort. At some point in the future, landfills will be mined for the minerals and petroleum-based products they contain, but until then, it would benefit us all to aim low. 

How low? Think personal. By filling the garbage can 26 times, I am producing somewhere between 66 and 146 pounds of trash every year. The EPA's figures indicate most people are pumping out just over a half ton; Americans are getting fatter, but even that is way more than most people weigh. If everyone aimed to produce no more than their weight, we'd see an 80% or more reduction in trash going to landfills, which would benefit is all (except maybe those future garbage miners).

ADiversion

What the heck does this have to do with it? For that matter, what is it?

In the last month or so, I keep getting hits here from people searching "A. D. disorder." Being from a culture that worships many maladies and their neuropsychopharmacological treatments, I'm guessing that they're looking for attention deficit disorder, but are too close to the beginning of their journey of enlightenment to know what the A and D stand for. Or, they are themselves stricken, and cannot focus well enough to choose between acronym and full terminology.


To the latter, I apologize. My post A. D. Disorder has nothing to do with ADD or its frenetic sibling ADHD. It's a brief essay on calendars and social domination. Not what you were looking for at all, and maybe exacerbating your condition by throwing you off track in your quest for relevant information. At least I don't remember there being any places in that post to click off to somewhere else.


Blogs have become a long form these days. Twixt text and tweets, ADD may have moved from disorder to the new order. I used to think of myself as shiftless, unable to focus on anything big or time-consuming: I blog, and do not novelize. But now, cranking out posts with hundreds of words, stretching 8 or 10 paragraphs some times, I appear to be cured. My attention deficit still leaves some slack compared to the emerging norm, in which people you talk with glance don at a tiny screen every few seconds.


And now, I have lost many of the people who started this post. Many of the people who land on this site spend less than 10 seconds. Some, because of ADD. Others, paradoxically, because they maintain enough focus to quickly identify my irrelevancies and enough discipline to move on. Those who remain are the special few who somehow skipped the top few pages of google results and landed in my iconoclastic domain. I thank you all for having the patience and curiosity to land where you did not expect, but take the time to look around. 


Now, off with you. Find some other strange cul-de-sac of the internet to fritter away your time. 


Oh, but first, something completely different.

On "Fighting for Freedom"

I won't subject the general audience to a purely political rant here. But over at Mo Comment, there's a new post about how we should completely change the concept of "fighting for freedom," so often invoked as justification for war, but not much used at home, where our freedom lives.

The post is here.

Crawler Free

Zero hits on this and the subsidiary blogs today. Way better than 1 or 3 or 7, which seem to be the multiples of web crawler hits.

Anthropocene

In case you did not know, there is an International Commission on Stratigraphy. They decide the chronostratigraphic units that reckon our geological time. I'm not saying they deserve the entire credit, but without them, we'd be stuck in the Pleistocene, baby.

But here we are all smart and modern, in the Holocene Epoch, ever since 11,787 years ago this coming December 22. We know this because a shift in deuterium excess values was observed in the GRIP ice core in central Greenland, spelling the bitter end of the Younger Dryas cold period. Adios, Pleistocene, giant sloths, and dire wolves.

Many stratigraphic units are decided by extinctions, but more often of much smaller creatures than the megafauna that capture our imagination. This makes sense, because stratigraphers intent on finding minute changes tend to look in fine layers of sediment, and it's hard to squeeze a mastodon into one of those, not to mention the fact that for every giant mammal there are untold multitudes of rotifers. And when temperatures change, or atmospheric chemistry shifts, certain teeny species die, while others emerge from obscurity to fill new muds with their skeletons. The individual deaths and the mass extinctions were not for naught, though, because their ancient sacrifices have borne unto us just the sort of evidence we need that the earth changes, and is nearly a million times older than the stratigraphy-deprived biblical scholars used to tell us.

Not that the establishment of global stratigraphic units is completely automatic, uniformly legible to all geologists. I don't know enough of the ICS workings to state it as a fact, but I do have enough familiarity with academia to hypothesize that there exist disputes, heated disagreements, perhaps even feuds over just what comprises a certain boundary, or precisely how old it is. One area of disagreement I do know about has to do with the most recent epoch, on the candidacy of the Anthropocene.

"Cene" is the favored ending for stratigraphic series that define epochs, at least since the dinosaurs left the scene. "Anthropo" of course refers to the most hairless and arrogant of the great apes. So Anthropocene refers to a new chronostratigraphic unit corresponding to our presence on a scale that influences geology.

Not so quick, some of the ICS brethren say. Perhaps we are again over-estimating our importance, and geology will wipe us and our sediments away. But it looks to me like we've deposited enough concrete to make our mark.

Among the pro-Anthropocene contingent, there are various ways of reckoning its onset. Some argue for the beginning of agriculture as the threshold, since this is when humans really began altering soils and sedimentation, both with intentional acts like tillage and terracing, as well as mistakes and disasters ranging from burst irrigation reservoirs to the Dust Bowl. Personally, I think agriculture will prove to be too fluid a concept to nail down a global start date, besides which it may end up subsuming the entire Holocene and perhaps more, depending on how it is defined, and then what is the ICS to do? Backtrack? I think they'd rather not.

Other criteria abound. Such as the beginnings of cities, which create deposits of structures and artifacts that last long after they people move on or bury them under more stuff, as we are wont to do. Or, the wave of extinctions in our wake. Or, carry on with the atmospheric chemistry or global climate approaches that have defined other chronostrata--we've warmed the earth and perforated the ozone, isn't that enough to merit (to our own demerit, maybe) a human epoch? It took us a while to get to that point, but what about the creation of highly radioactive isotopes? It is no coincidence that the "present" in radiocarbon time is AD 1950, the years when enough atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs occurred to screw up any subsequent carbon dates.

Eventually, it won't matter what we say. Alien paleontologists will land on earth and reckon by their own system. They'll find a strata rich with large bipeds, and if they are lucky, they may find one of them clutching a laminated copy of the International Stratigraphic Chart.

Skagit Air

 

Two pleasures make the thousand-plus miles of driving I do each month bearable, and occasionally sublime. Both come through the air to me, or any other driver with eyes and ears: photons bouncing off scenery and radio waves broadcasting from towery.

To round a bend and see snowy tors, trees towering as forests blanket, water racing to the Salish Sea, spring and fall foliage, and, and, and. To see any of those, especially on some blue highway where you can pull over or slow to landscape pace, is to experience anew wonder, which I guess is why I pity people who think epiphany is a rare thing.

The radio, it's more something to wile away the miles. Satellite radio remains in my future (and even then, only maybe), the tape deck in the truck beckons my past and finds that all the cassettes were dumped before last move (a collection ranging from Richmond hardcore punk bands to some Dead and Allmond Brothers foisted on me in college to, uh, memory grows dim now). I drive a government rig, so there ain't no fancy stuff like a CD player. 

So, it's radio, which suits me fine. I tend to go with community stations (KAOS near home, KBOO nearer Portland, KSER in Everett,...), or cherrypick from the wide array of public radio. Now and then, a college station comes in (like coming down toward CWU from Blewett Pass). In some places, classic rock is the only thing better than country or religious stations. The latter of which I sometimes listen to, believe it or not, because  it's good to understand what people hear, especially because Christians operate the most powerful transmitters in marginal areas and are the only thing to listen to.

But usually by that point, traffic has let up, scenery holds its own, and the radio is off. 

Last week, I found myself running north and downstream (mapheads may already have guessed that this is along the Sauk toward its marriage with the Skagit), already in shadow as the sun settled its way down past the islands. But the sky was clearer than smart people expect at this time of year, and as I hit the final stretch, the moonrise came into view. The photo above is from the Skagit River bridge, and cannot come close to capturing the beauty. Moonwash on fresh snow, the river sluicing the old snow seaward beneath me. River trees hugging leaves close, claiming a few more nights of their warmth before skeletonizing for the winter. I hung a U and drove back over to see it, stopped, rolled down the window, took some photos, breathed river air, rolled on and did another and idled leisurely back across before heading down-valley. 

The moon smiled in my mirror between the trees when they'd let her as I sped into the fading sunset. Then she rose above them, and the ridges and even the big peaks with names like Little Devil and Big Devil, Mount Torment and Forbidden Peak. Shining unshrouded, moonbeams free to play on rapids and pools, boughs and bergs,...and in my rearview mirror. 

Even though I was enjoying the scenery, it was getting dark, draining color and making it harder not just to look, but to drive safely on a road more traveled. Eyes on the road, ears took over, and I tuned to Skagit Valley Radio, KSVR 91.7. I'd heard them before, and besides my bias for community radio, had found that they possess a miraculous thing: a broadcast range that reaches way up-valley, farther than you'd expect for anything other than religious stations (and maybe some brute force commercial transmitters, but I don't get to that end of the dial much). It's always a joy to be way outside of town and hear something other than Christian radio or its more commercial colleague, Country.

Eventually, I got back to what passes for civilization these days and had to face I-5. As I climbed the on-ramp, a Seattle station played the cruel joke of starting a Fresh Air episode promising to blow the lid off everything we think we know about canine domestication, and then a minute replacing it with some lame-ass big-C culture thing. I know that they'd played the dog one the night before, but the radio spell was broken.

But the moon was still there, shining in my window, lighting a few wispy clouds. I stole some glances while trying not to crash or be crashed all the way home.

Meanwhile, Over at Procrastacritic

In October, I posted another review from the archives, this time about Rocky. Then I delved into TV, with an episode from the original Hawai`i Five-O. Somewhere along the line, my unhealthy fascination with Joe Dirt came to the surface. Now, I've completed another TV-land review, about the human denizens (and one robot) of Lost In Space. 

All these and of course delvings into Hestopia appear at the Procrastacritic blog, and I am too lazy to copy them here. 

Occupy Walmart

One of the litmi of the Left is Walmart. "I Don't Shop at Walmart" stickers appear on bumpers of old Volvos, Prius's, and other awkward-to-pluralize brands preferred by progressives. Labor protests the poor wages (poorer still if you are a woman) and the anti-union stance of the company. Liberals smirk and giggle at that People of Walmart website.

And strangely enough, it works in the other direction as well. The Right--or at least the rank and file, the commoners with the votes, the LumpenRight--shops at Walmart. Scoop up them Asian goods, even though it meant your brother got laid off. Buy that beflaggled patriot wear and the disney princess crap. Squint and grunt at them commies who would let unions into Walmart. Swipe the card while Walmart swipes your paychecks. And for God's sake, vote Republican.

So, with this powerful symbol of piratical capitalism run amok, amidst every community with a 15 acre pad site and the critical mass of consumer households to offer, we are occupying parks? Parks?! Land that already belongs to the public?

Granted, marching into a Wall Street Bank or a Walmart Street retail establishment and setting up a tent invariably results in arrests, whereas most cops are just letting the protesters stay in the parks, entertaining themselves at the seeming cluelessness of some college kids, and the un-bra'd chests of others. Occupying private property is frowned upon in the US, and it's really hard to imagine Occupy Walmart lasting more than a few days, ending in the ozone and burnt hair aromatic aftermath of taser fests of the rent-a-cops and eventually the real ones.

But, we can protest outside. We can hold up signs about jobs outsourced and landfills bursting, about grandpa serving his country and working all his life only to be humiliated as Greeter because he cannot afford retirement. OK, that's a long sign, but you know what I mean.

And, stealthily, we can protest inside. Pick up something and replace it on the wrong shelf. Try on the maximum number of clothes every time, ask for assistance, do whatever it takes to make the workers work more, because that's the only way they'll get more hours and more cash, the only way Walmart will create more jobs (crappy though they may be). Get yourself hired there, and then invite in a union. Go in and apply stickers with "This Used to be Made in America" or some other clever shit I cannot think of right now.

Or not. You don't need to sneak and snivel. Get in their face. Rouse the rabble, yell crazy stuff or go all yippie-theater on them 'til they escort you off the premises, making everyone there a little freaked out, a little less inclined to hang around and spend more. You don't even have to go there physically, just write letters to the editor, blog, expend your own breath ranting and exhorting (or, if you are not a blowhard like myself, riffing reasoning). Talk to your Walmart-shopping friends about how the place sucks money out of localities (not just what you spend there, but jobs lost, taxes unpaid, resources expended on their behalf, not to mention that act that someone who works at Walmart is eligible for welfare because the pay is so shitty).

Occupy Walmart however you see fit. Squelching the flow of customers, shaming the company in the public eye (all you gotta do is tell the truth for that to work), or advocating for their workers. Whatever you want to do. Just don't buy anything there.

Where's the Food, Dude?

It Went That-a-Way

Don' let the picture fool you, it's over at my food blog, Mocavore. Remember how I said I was gonna start spinning off topics? Well, I got on my ass and did it.

Mocavore is where I'll put up the canning, where there will be foraging reports and recipes. Oh, and the Garden series that used to be here? It's gonna root itself over there now. Food from the stone age to what's still on the stove may be featured. I'll ramble about my eating habits and bramble about agribusiness. Also, there will be pie. Or maybe just a crisp. I am not enough of a foodie to care about crust.


As for now, there's the initial post, which aims to make sense of what the blog will be, but will lok like a wider and wider miss as time goes by. "Mocavore" means nothing. I went with it out of lassitude (roll over the first letter of Locavore) and egomania. 





Anyway, that's where the food is. There are a few more posts up as well, about gardening and what's in the pantry, as well as the most recent, which is about this.

 

Cannes You Effing Believe it?

Massive unemployment, enforced austerity, pittances eroded to nothing, poverty growing deeper.

Meanwhile, the G20, self-proclaimed leaders of the global economy, live it up in the Riviera.

This is gall unmitigated, for the politicians, property of the corporate titans, to be in Cannes, concocting plans to force the swarthier of the Europeans, and for that matter, commoners everywhere, to do their bidding. A global elite of technocrats (fronting for the parasitic plutocrats) teaming up to tell the workers what sacrifices they need to make, foisting on local leaders a set of monitoring regimes and conversions of state resources into private property. "Give up your drachma and democracy," say the 20, "and we'll give you Euros and austerity." And should the Greeks or anyone else have the gall to insist on a voice, a vote, they'll be punished with a coordinated financial assault, after which the buzzards will swoop down to pick the bones clean and sell off the skeletons.


Sadly, I can believe it. Morosely, I see the alleged champion of change and freedom that I helped elect, smiling broadly, happy to be part of the pack of wolves devouring the rest of us before we get too skinny to be any good. 

Or no, that metaphor is wrong. The literal truth is more disgusting, and less insulting to wolves. The G20 dine on fine French food and wine (as the rest of us subsist on beans and rice), then retire to the veranda to take in the balmy Mediterranean air, or to the smoking room to hatch further plans for transforming government pensions and social safety nets into guarantees that the world will be safe for oligarchs to invest profitably.

If for no other reason, the leaders who engage in this sort of behavior should be punished for being so severely irony impaired. If they keep up this blind ambition, they will awake to the surprising reality that they are far outnumbered, that they are Mubarak and Marie Antoinette. And the poor will drink their champagne for a while, then get back to work.

Unoccupy Wall Street

My last post expressed some doubt as to the sustainability and soundness of the Occupy protests happening. It is only fair to suggest alternatives, or be branded a do-nothing whiner.

So, let's Unoccupy Wall Street. Denizens of the financial district are not among the readers here, so we can begin by claiming success in terms of the physical place, but you know that's not what I'm getting at. Divest. Don't let your money occupy their vaults.

You live near a credit union that can take care of your banking needs from saving pennies to getting a home mortgage, and they won't Lincoln and Hamilton you to death with fees. You'll be a member, sharing in the profits and governance of a financial entity beholden to a broader ownership and longer time horizon than profit-obsessed big banks. You may also have a local bank that has a stake in a healthy community and treats its customers decently. Either choice beats parking your money in an institution prisoner to quarterly profits, sophisticated (yet still fundamentally stupid) gambles, publicly-funded bail-outs, exalted executives, and just plain greed.

But I don't need to convince you why, just that you should take that step if you already have not, and make your personal finances Unoccupy Wall Street. This November, vote with your finances. While media images of hippies and anarchists doing everything from wearing sinister masks to making love easily lend themselves to dismissal or discrediting of the Occupy movement, it would be hard to misinterpret the image of a run on the banks, a line of people in front of Bank of America waiting to withdraw their funds. If I had the audience to pull it off, I'd call for November to be Vote With Your Money month, a coordinated action. Doing an Unoccupy Wall Street event during the election month (or maybe the cyclical, slower-building version of the plan: Withdrawal Wednesdays), seems like a decent strategy to focus attention and impact on the action.

The financial effect to the big financial players would be negligible to begin with, and the power would be in the perception that we commoners are sick of playing their game. But as was the case with ending South African Apartheid, a few humble divestitures can lead to a few more, and eventually reach a tipping point where continuing business as usual becomes too costly, and real progress happens. You can be the beginning.

Meanwhile, it's a matter of retreating from the various corporate territories you occupy. Get food that was grown closer to you (your own yard would be a good place to start), and processed less; go to restaurants run by local families. Clothe yourself at thrift stores and yard sales, so even if that shirt was made for a famous name brand, they don't get a cent on the transaction. Keep driving the same old car (repaired by your unemployed neighbor or a local shop) or hop on a bike or bus. Disconnect the cable and just use your phone for phone calls instead of incessantly connecting to the corporate web. Make your gifts.

So really, unoccupying Wall Street turns out to be a bunch of small, easy steps. You'll find that you end up saving money. You will be more free of the corporate matrix, and at the same time more connected to your community and interested in its welfare. In the short term, divesting improves your life. If enough people unoccupy Wall Street, then in time our nation's life will take a turn for the better. Try it.