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Why I am Occupying the Port of Houston

Posted in Occupy Wall Street

How do you fight a company with a trillion dollars in assets?

Poster by @postnaught

This is the question I have been asking myself as we prepare for the Port Shutdown, an international day of action happening today. Beginning with an initiative from the west coast, what started as a port shutdown has become a global moment. Occupiers from all over the state of Texas (including myself) are coming together in Houston for action at our own port.

I should be asleep now but this is keeping me up.

The primary target of this action is Goldman Sachs, the transnational corporation which owns almost a trillion dollars in assets, hidden away in dozens of offshore subsidiaries. They have fingers in pretty much every pie.

What we have here is a genuine moustache-twirling super villain. If they hadn’t already bought the world, their assets are probably more than enough to militarily make a play for it.

What can any of us do in the face of this and so many others like them? I don’t have an answer. It seems impossible. Maybe it is.

But I feel like we have to try. In this moment, people are rising up all around the world. We’re seeing what may be the beginnings of a global uprising. It’s been a long time coming — and it may be still. We’re planting seeds, but who knows when they will grow.

Yet I feel like we have to try. As the government considers indefinite detention of its own citizens, as the police state shows its true colors, I feel like we do not have any other choice.

Left to its own devices, we’re not headed in a good direction. We have incredible tools in our hands — technology that is empowering this movement and making possible previously impossible ways to communicate. Yet many of those same developments can lead to horror, to what some have called the Grim Meathook Future, as repression, corruption, war and poverty grow until our world becomes a hell.

I occupy because I don’t want to live in that future. I’d rather be disappeared to some new Guantanamo than live in a future where we have no hope. This movement may well be the beginning of our last chance to save ourselves. Even when we are faced with monolithic supervillains, even when faced with impossible odds, we have to try to make something better.

I’ll be liveblogging #D12 #GulfportAction on my Twitter, @Kitoconnell. If you can’t participate, watch in solidarity. If you haven’t joined Occupy yet, consider this: What will it take to push you to the point where you stand up for the future?

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