Daily Connect: Rebecca Solnit on The Irish Famine, Mohammed Bouazizi, and Occupy Wall Street

by Patrick Groneman

In a recent post on tomdispatch.com, author Rebecca Solnit offers a wide view of the Occupation events unfolding across the globe.

The piece, titled "Letters to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope" is addressed to Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian man who burned himself to death last year after having his unlicensed vegetable stand confiscated by a policewoman, who then reportedly slapped and spat on him.

"You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope."

Solnit goes on to frame the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Libya as offshoots of the same state of frustration that drove him to his death:

"Who could have imagined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the unimaginable world. Again."

(Tunisians holding painted portrait of Mohammed Bouazizi, the artists having just put the finishing touches. Taken on Avenue Bourguiba, Tunis, Tunisia. -- By cjb22, via Wikimedia Commons )

Taking a longer view, she connects the tragedy of the Irish Potato Famine to the wealth inequality we still witness today:

"The Irish Hunger Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland remained a food-exporting country and the landed gentry continued to profit... ..[it] was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution. The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and has an abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food -- so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution."

She ends with a few examples of crises in which cooperative survival becomes the MO for the effected communities, citing NYC after 9/11 as one of the examples. (This was also the subject of her book "A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster")

She likens the current economic crisis as requiring this same coopertaive style response, and so we find ourselves with OccupyWallStreet.

Her piece weaves the the warmth of love for humanity into a socio-political landscape that is sharp and revealing. 

And to Mohammed Bouazizi, whose death was a protest of social incarceration, may your spirit and sacrifice continue to bring liberation to the masses.