The night before the first big Occupy Wall Street rally at Foley Square in early October, I went to my local bookstore to hear Chris Lehmann speak about his new book, Rich People Things, which explores, with penetrating hilarity, the follies of the “one percent.” During the discussion, a number of us were struck by the way the obscenely wealthy few are proud to be an “elite” in contrast to the way the term, along with kindred ideas like taste, discrimination, and distinction, have been completely discredited—vilified—in matters of culture. From there the discussion turned to the poverty of our language of dissent and revolt, the resourcelessness of our political imaginations. The historians among us spoke of the radical labor movement that emerged in the last part of the nineteenth century and offered a number of examples of their compelling visceral imagery—plutocrats as “blood-sucking parasites of property”; the factory labor system as “a prison-house” or “chattel slavery”; the competition between men that underwrites capitalism as “bestial”; industrial cities as “inexpressibly base and ugly.” A young woman in the audience said that the nineteenth-century language did not sit well with her and that her generation did not feel comfortable with the language of 1960s “Up against the wall, mother-f-er” confrontation. She expressed some concern that her ivy-league college education—she had been an American Studies major—had made her so hyper-sensitive to speaking ill of anyone that she no longer had words that felt right to her to condemn those responsible for wrecking our country.

Happily this sensitive young woman’s concerns turned out to be misplaced. Her generation’s commitment to inclusiveness, in the hands of the Occupy Wall Street movement, has unexpectedly and against all odds reinvigorated our political life. Here I am thinking of the statement on their website—“Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders, and political persuasions”—as well as their slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” and their brilliant improvisatory answer to the prohibition on using amplification at Zuccotti Park—the surprisingly moving and effective “mic check,” which makes everyone present stop, pay attention, and participate, as all those within earshot of the speaker repeat as a group—a kind of human microphone—phrase by phrase, what the speaker is saying.

Their ringing egalitarian language delivered by this improvisatory method has given many of us who have long felt demoralized a reason for hope. Still, I don’t think my husband was alone in being surprised by the good feeling of the huge rally at Foley Square on November 17, which marked the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Yet, how could one not feel jubilant to be part of a vibrant, attractive crowd that stretched in every direction as far as we could see (later estimated at 32,000), whose chants—“We are unstoppable! A new world is possible!” was one of the favorites—reverberated along the stone corridor of soaring, lit skyscrapers as we marched down Broadway to the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk? It was a wonderful contrast to the scene just six weeks before, when over seven hundred men and women had been roughly corralled and arrested as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on a Sunday afternoon.

When we were met by a phalanx of police officers on horseback at the approach to the Bridge and the crowd chanted, “We don’t see no riot here! Cops, take off your riot gear!” my husband again commented on the high spirits, how different the atmosphere was from the rage of anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s. I reminded him of an earlier, tense moment when we were part of an ever-enlarging crowd at Foley Square ridiculously, claustrophobically, hemmed in by police barricades and the people around us spontaneously pushed the barricades into the street and the police came rushing at us in full riot gear with their billy clubs raised. They were met with the chant, “Whose street? Our street!”—a chant I have found surprisingly stirring, “empowering,” as they say, when I’ve been part of a crowd in a frightening confrontation. But it was only when we were threatened on that celebratory evening that I for the first time chanted out loud with full voice and fury. And as I was chanting, I noticed a sign, typical of the Occupy Wall Street sensibility: “More Sincerity, Less Irony.”

Later that night, as we spoke further about what we had experienced, I agreed with my husband that there did seem to be a new kind of civility emerging and, given the youth and sophistication of many of our fellow protestors, perhaps we were seeing the fruit of college educations that we had been in the habit of dismissing as “politically correct.” After all, what was the call for “non-hierachical relations” but a call for respect for the dignity of others, although in literature and art departments, it had felt like a kind of displacement, anemic in comparison, to what we were now seeing in the streets? My husband then reminded me that non-violent resistance/action demands a recognition of and respect for the humanity of one’s oppressors. And the Occupy movement is vehemently anti-violent; their inspiration is the Arab Spring. Now, as I write these words, I thought of the horrifying video of the students at UC Davis—not the sensational minute or two where defenseless students are pepper-sprayed by Police Lieutenant John Pike and that the whole world has seen, but rather the far more stunning incident about six minutes after the cold-blooded assault that never made it onto television news.