In a December 2014 interview with Esquire, Micah White, one of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) founders said, “My thinking is moving away from protest. Instead, I’m more interested with…getting large numbers of people to change their behaviors, to de-pattern themselves…” He realized what he had been doing wasn’t working.

For any of our activism to bring into effect the hoped for ideal of long-term systemic change, it would have to follow the lead of the likes of women’s suffrage. It would go beyond making ourselves feel better in the short-term and aim for changing the character of our imagined enemies. Martin Luther King calls this the double victory:

“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you… Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.’”

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