Michael Greenberg (born 1952) is a columnist for The Times Literary Supplement.

Quotes

• When I asked Amin [Husain] and Katie [Davison] what Occupy Wall Street’s ultimate goal was, they said, “A government accountable to the people, freed up from corporate influence.” … Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing your life together in assembly.” … The ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face; what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty gaze of the screen.

In meetings and elsewhere, this Tolstoyan experience of undergoing a personal crisis of meaning, both political and of the soul, seemed deeply shared. Apart from Amin, I’ve met an architect, a film editor, an advertising consultant, an unemployed stock trader, a spattering of lawyers, and people with various other jobs who, after joining OWS, found themselves psychologically unable to go about their lives as before. … Michael Ellick, the minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, said that when he first visited Zuccotti Park he was reminded of his years at a monastery. “When people enter a monastery, they don’t know why they’ve come,” said Ellick. “They are there to find out why they are there, why they were compelled to leave the other world.”

• “What Future for Occupy Wall Street?” The New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 2, February 9, 2012

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