There’s no such thing as a view from nowhere. Almost a year ago, I stayed up all night waiting for the night coach to Chicago with a busload of young Occupy activists headed to the G20 conference. I shared a smoke with a gang of lads who weren’t more than twenty, whipping out the recorder from time to time to collect quotes for the piece I was writing. I began to ask them about their politics, their understanding of economics, when one of them, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout called Sean, whipped out a dollar bill from his pocket, set light to it and used it to light his cigarette. “That’s debt, and that’s what we do with it,” he said. He wasn’t a rich kid, not by anyone’s standards. He owned the clothes he was standing in, a rucksack full of random belongings and half a cigarette.

He needed that dollar. But he burned it anyway.

I keep coming back to this moment, every time somebody asks how I can possibly claim to be objective when covering radical politics and youth movements as I have been for the past three years. Little Sean burning his money on a Manhattan street corner at two in the morning. His friends laughing and whooping, and me knowing that there’s no way they’d have done that if I hadn’t been there.