It is Sunday evening, and I’m sitting down to write another installment of my Experimental Memoir. This is part of National Novel Writing Month where people try to write a whole novel of fifty thousand words in a month. I’ve been submitting long blog posts reflecting on the month as a sort of stream of consciousness homage to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others. I mention this for the benefit for people jumping into the middle of this stream.

On Thursday, Fiona and Kim went to the Occupy Hartford protest. Fiona spoke with police officers who supported the movement and who understood their role in protecting everyone, and not just a few. She learned about civil disobedience and the importance of standing up against injustice and inequality.

Fiona is part of a multi-aged group in her school. There are about seventy-five students in four grades and they do various things together as a large group and other activities with students their own age. On Fridays they have a ‘meeting’ with all the students to discuss the issues of the week and to share what is going on. Fiona described her experiences at the demonstration.

At ten years of age, Fiona already has quite a political background. She appeared with Governor Dean when he was running for President when she was just two years old. She handed out palm cards for Kim the following year when Kim was running for State Representative, urging people heading into the polling location to “Vote for Mommy”.

When she was six, I started doing an internet based radio show with her just about every week. Together, we’ve talked about the events of the week. We’ve had some great guests on the show including Howard Dean, Dannell Malloy, Denise Merrill, Kevin Lembo, Rosa DeLauro and several State Representatives. This evening, she spoke about her experiences at the demonstration and about talking about it with her classmates.

We also spoke a little bit about what has happened at University of California at Davis. She has seen some of the videos and generally knows what happened.

On Friday evening, Kim, Fiona and I attended the Connecticut Citizens Action Group fortieth anniversary gala. Fiona saw various long time friends and people who had been guests on her radio show. Yet perhaps the most interesting discussion was with an experienced activist who asked me if I thought we were at the beginning of a movement. I didn’t hesitate to say that I believe so.

I spoke about my experience at the first Occupy Hartford meetings. One of the people stood up and said he was from Tunisia and was greeted by a large round of applause. Yes, the occupy movement is part of something much bigger which is tied to Tunisia and Egypt and beyond. My friend remained unconvinced at spoke about the difficulties occurring in Egypt right now.

It is important to differentiate between a movement and short term political successes or setbacks. Yes, I believe the occupy movement is part of a larger movement which includes Tunisia, and Egypt as well as other places like Libya, Syria, and perhaps even Iran. I don’t believe this is a small short term change will have a minor effect on the 2012 U.S. elections and then fade away. No, there’s something else going on here, and it has to do with a lot more than people setting up tents in various cities.

One thought comes to me from Jeff Jarvis. Jeff is a journalism professor at City University of New York. He is well known for talking about how journalism needs to change in the age of the Internet. He has often spoken about Guttenberg and how that changed the way knowledge and power were distributed. He’s taken that to challenge journalists, and particularly freshly minted journalism school graduates, to think about the parallels between what Guttenberg did to publishing and what the internet is doing to journalism.

Yet recently, he came up with a challenging thought. What if we haven’t even seen the beginning of the changes that the internet is bringing to our world. Perhaps that is another aspect of the occupy movement. Everyone has talked about the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Arab spring.

I think this is an important idea. You can’t tell what a movement is going to look like when it is just beginning. You can have ideas, but it can be a long bumpy road and different themes will emerge over time.

One of the first messages I saw on Twitter about the pepper spraying at UC Davis was about it being an image that would be engrained in everybody’s mind. Over the next couple days, it became clearer and it appears as if a new narrative is emerging.

James Fallows wrote this article for The Atlantic, The Moral Power of an Image: UC Davis Reactions. He compares the images of the UC Police Officer spraying students with pepper spray to images “of black civil rights protestors being fire-hosed by Bull Connor's policemen in Alabama” and “the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square”. These are powerful images and there are plenty more that come to mind.

As an update, Fallows mentions “The disciplined, contemptuous dead silence of the protestors through whom UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walks en route to her car…[as] another astonishingly powerful demonstration of moral imagery”.

Yet, as interesting as it is to talk about the imagery, there is another word that resonates through Fallows article, “morality”.

One early tweet about UC Davis compared the event to the Stanford Experiments surrounded by hundreds of handheld cameras. The tweet didn’t mention the moral issues, but it was clearly implied.

Over in Psychology Today, Michael Chorost wrote, The turning point: The moral example of UC Davis students, and Occupy Wall Street He starts off saying, “This event is powerfully symbolic. It is about contempt from those in power and the wanton use of force against the powerless.”

He goes on to say,

If I had to sum up the attitude of America's governing classes in one word, I would say: contempt.
We are seeing the beginning of a worldwide movement to fight for dignity and intelligent, collective governance.

He ends his article with, “I think we have just reached a turning point.”

Last month, I wrote a blog post entitled Occupy New England. In it, I wrote,

Yet our country has a tendency to forget its roots. Too many leaders sacrifice a love of their neighbors for a love of money. At times, we return to our ideals with ‘Great Awakenings’, returning to the underlying moral beliefs, not about who can marry whom, but about how we should care for one another.

All of these thoughts ran through my mind as I occupied my space in a pew in a small New England church. Perhaps, the occupy movement is part of a call to return to the underlying morality, a compassion for our neighbors, that I believe our country was built on.

My interest in Great Awakenings is nothing new. Back in the summer of 2010, I wrote in a different blog post about a visit to a friend’s church,

A key interest for me is telling our stories online. I’ve been interested in the history of revivalism in America. The Great Awakenings have led not only to great religious revivals, but also to major political and social changes. Will the twenty first century bring us a Great Digital Awakening? What might that look like?

So, for the month of November, I’ve been telling my story, in great detail, online. I continue to listen to the stories around me, especially stories about the Occupy movement and moral ground. Perhaps the occupy movement is really part of something much, much greater. Initially, I had written about it in terms of renegotiating the social contract. Perhaps it is also about recalibrating the moral compass.

At church today, the lesson was from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-five. When I came home, I took a line from the Gospel and added it to one of the pictures of the students being pepper sprayed by the police officer. I added a line about praying for the police officer, the chief of police and the chancellor.

Yes, it is time to recalibrate our moral compasses and take the moral high ground.