The Occupy movement’s latest recruit
Emma Sullivan is a High School student from Shawnee Mission in Kansas. She has 60 followers on Twitter and like millions of 18 year old girls she lavishly tweets, blogs and Facebooks about Justin Bieber or the hunky vampires in the Twilight Series.
But in recent days Emma has found herself discussed, admired or maligned on Cable TV.
Her older sister Olivia, a student at Wichita State University, is fielding interview requests from the morning shows and acting as her unofficial agent. No, Emma Sullivan is NOT suing Justin Bieber for paternity.
She has become the latest poster child of the spirit of anti establishment insurgency that has ruffled a country that spent much of the last decade being polite and conformist.
After a school visit to the state capital Topeka, Kansas, which involved a meeting with Governor Sam Brownback, Emma tweeted that she had told him he “sucked” and that she did so in person.
Brownback’s people discovered the teen tweet when they were trawling the internet for mentions of their boss –there weren’t too many.
Stung by her critique, the governor’s thin-skinned henchmen immediately contacted the principal of her high school, to pressure him, to pressure her to apologize.
Young Emma was on the verge of saying sorry when she called her older sister, the student, who urged her to stand firm, issue no apology and stick to her First Amendment Rights of Free Speech. The Occupy movement in Wichita was proud to count another supporter.
Even as one tent encampment after another is closed down by the police, the spirit of protest will be more difficult to shut down.
Many have wondered whether the absence of a physical location to occupy, or the daily images of tents, “general assemblies” and the curious mixture of caravanserai correctness and insufficient personal hygiene will deprive the Occupy movement of the oxygen of publicity.
What next for Occupy?
What will happen to Occupy Wall Street when there is nothing and no one left to film? Personally I think the end of the camps is doing the movement a favour because it means less focus on those inevitable stories about the less seemly side of outdoor living in the middle of winter.
In Britain, the Occupy St Paul’s movement ended up being mostly about the battle with and between the clergy of Britain’s most famous church over how to handle the protests on their doorstep. This was irrelevant to the bigger picture.
In America, the OWS movement, as it is now frequently referred to, has had an astounding success. It has spawned protest movements all over the country and beyond. Occupy….has become a branded pre fix in a matter of weeks.
President Obama and his opponents have had to take issue with it. Even lofty billionaires like George Soros have felt the need to warn politicians that they ignore OWS at their peril.
New York Magazine has a cover story this week that links 2011 to 1968, the year of the student revolt. But in some ways this year is even more explosive. It has gone viral in a matter of weeks rather than months and crucially it cuts across generations.
The OWS phenomenon is part of a much broader sense of betrayal that the social and economic contracts, which have traditionally underpinned America and its dreams of prosperity, are broken.
Middle class America feels as if it has been taken a ride and that the class-war has been fought by the top one per cent against everyone else.
To quote Emma Sullivan, the widespread impression is that life in the land of the free and the home of the brave “sucks”. Whether it’s on Twitter or in tents expect 2012 to be the (election) year of living rudely.
And some late breaking news … We have just heard that Governor Brownback has told reporters that his staff over-reacted when they tried to extract an apology from Ms Sullivan. The governor of Kansas (open, rural and deeply conservative) has now issued his own apology to HER. Times are indeed a-changing.
Follow Matt Frei on Twitter: @mattfrei