The author provides a very sensible understanding of the activities of particularly the Occupy movement in Oakland, California. In contrast to Chris Hedges who prefers to moralize from a privileged middle class background and who sees the Oakland Occupiers as victims of a cancer, Solnit cuts through all the mainstream media distortions, humanizes all the participants, and sees the essential features that have brought so many people together in Oakland who have finally had enough of the violence of the One Percent and their system of capitalism.
My only problem with her essay is that she plays the gender card too often and uses the word "system" only twice without naming it. This is typical of the liberal journalists, of which Solnit is one, at Nation magazine.
...it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men -- and with the rarest of exceptions they were men -- who stole the world.When she gets around to underlying causes, she can only state that it is "economic violence", presumably inflicted by men:
...many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.