occupiers in washington square, NYC, 10-8-11
Watching the Occupiers as their numbers mushroom, as the cities they occupy proliferate, is really a flashback to the sixties. It’s the same kind of movement – grass roots, organic, spurred by an emotional and intuitive certainty that something is very wrong in this country. And when enough people feel this, the masses take to the streets. And when the 99% take to the streets in such great numbers, the media snaps to attention, even the politicians who live on the planet Pluto can’t help but notice.
Some media outlets have criticized this movement because it doesn’t have, well, you know, an agenda. In media speak, that means: What are the talking points? What’s the declaration? Who are your leaders? Who speaks for you? I actually think that in the beginning, the lack of an agenda was a plus. But now the movement is so much larger that it may be time to flex its political muscle.
During the protests of the sixties, the war in Vietnam was the issue. The draft still existed. People saw the draft as sanctioned murder. We also had great music that infused us with a kind of primal rage toward a system that we knew was unjust and plain wrong.
On May 4, 1970, four college students at Kent State were murdered by the National Guard during a protest. Here’s a timeline of the events that led up to this horror. As a result of this travesty, on May 9, 1970, 100,000 marched on Washington, D.C. to protest the shootings and Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, which many of us saw as an expansion of the Vietnam War.
On the night of May 8, 1970, I drove my old VW from Utica, New York to D.C. and it was jammed with people. We were three deep in the front seat, four in the back. In those days, the trip took about eight hours. I remember that we camped that night in a park with hundreds of other protestors. The people I was with had come well-prepared – food and water, sleeping bags, even pillows, and, more importantly, they had handkerchiefs coated with Vaseline, which was supposed to protect you from tear gas or whatever else might be sprayed through the crowd.
That night, as I looked out across the park where we all camped illegally, I could see pinpricks of light – cigarettes, candles, flashlights –and knew I was a witness to history, that something important was shifting. The next day, as a hundred thousand of us converged on D.C., I saw only a sea of humanity. I heard the cacophony of a collective voice that you can hear now from the occupiers of wherever you live. Their message is layered – not just war, but economical tyranny of the 1 percent, the domination of corporatism at the expense of everyone else, unemployment, class warfare, corrupt politicians. But really, the bigger message is the same: the existing paradigm no longer works. Capitalism is now a monster.
Back then, we didn’t have the Internet, Facebook, cell phones, Twitter. We were a disconnected, disenfranchised group and we knew it, and it didn’t matter. We were connected by something deeper, more mysterious, a passion that knew no bounds. Just like the occupiers.
And yet, even after that protest in 1970, it took three more years before military involvement in Vietnam ceased and until April 1975 for the war to officially end. I was in graduate school when the military involvement ended. I remember being in the apartment of a friend and caught a snippet on TV and thought, Wow, what was this about again? Nearly 60,000 Americans killed, more than a million others, I mean, really, what was the point?
Now, more than forty years later, what has changed? War is still big business, but there’s no more draft. The U.S. is still the world cop, we support dictators and supply them with weapons, only to turn against them when the tide of pubic opinion has turned. For a list of such dictators and the policies that support them, Google Naomi Klein. She wrote the definitive book about these American tactics in The Shock Doctrine. Economist Paul Krugman nails it, too.
My hope is that the occupiers continue to occupy, that those vested in the existing paradigm keep howling about how un-American it is, and that the change doesn’t take 3-5 years. One thing is obvious: the existing paradigm won’t end with a whimper. The 1 percent will fight the 99 percent all the way. But if we’re a country of the people and for the people, change will come. The 99 percent will win.
There is a new wind blowing – and it is just beginning.
https://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152684/why_corporate_elites_should_be_petrified_of_occupy_wall_street/
Thanks for the link, Nancy! Off to check it out.
Great post…thank you! I’ve been reading a few blogs recently…some pro and some against the protests…and what I’m noticing is that people are polarizing around this issue. Just a few minutes ago I was visiting the blog of someone who I’ve been following for several years and have greatly enjoyed her creativity and generally sensitive musings on life, but her post was very much against this protest because she saw it as anti capitalist=anti America. I should mention that I’m not an American but our countries are so interlinked (as is the whole world really) that what happens in one place, effects the other.
My thoughts are that it’s time to stop looking at issues as being black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. It’s time to come together to problem solve rather point fingers. It’s time to see which idea’s from one camp can be melded with suggestions from the other. If we insist on trying to solve the problem within the parameters of an old energy, we’ll keep on getting the same solution. As Rumi so eloquently put it…”Out beyond right or wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
You already know my opinion on the protests. Believe it or not, I actually agree with a lot of what these folks stand for. I just don’t think protesting en masse is the answer. In the Arab world, yes, protest and revolution was the only way for those people to have a voice. But in America we have elections. We get to choose our leaders. And if they betray our trust, we get to fire them on election day.
Protests won’t change anything, and Wall Street isn’t even the enemy. What we need is to elect leaders who are willing to do the right thing, even if it means not getting that big campaign contribution. We need leaders who listen and do the will of the people they represent, instead of bowing to the will of their corporate sponsors. To get there we need people willing to vote for independent candidates instead of the “lesser of two evils” Democrat or Republican. And that requires an educated electorate – people who understand what the issues are and what the candidates truly stand for. We’ll never have that with the current system in place, because the vast majority of voters have absolutely no idea who they’re really voting for or why. And a bunch of people camping in tents on Wall Street or anywhere else won’t change that. I stand by my earlier statement that they look like disorganized wackos out there who won’t be taken seriously by the majority of people in this country. Even if you have a million people protesting and 20 million more supporting them from afar, there are still 287,745,538 (based on 2010 census figures) others who think they’re nut jobs. There are better ways to educate the electorate. Protesting isn’t it.
The problem has been the lack of protest, the appearance of apathy that has allowed the corruption to spread and spread. Wall Street, Washington lobbyists, multinational corporations, big money to corrupt politicians, Republican and Democrats. The only difference is that the Republicans boast about it and call those opposing greed ‘unAmerican.’ Sad situation. We need the protests to continue to flourish to keep the heat on. I know it’s uncomfortable for some, but it’s necessary.
You’re right about the appearance of apathy – but is it the lack of protest that gives that appearance, or just the unwillingness to vote the corrupt politicians out of office?
When Representatives and Senators start getting fired, it sends a stronger message than any protest ever can.
>>When Representatives and Senators start getting fired, it sends a stronger message than any protest ever can.
Ha, not when the corporations – who are people as Romney tells us – run the system. They buy both sides. Dems held congress and the presidency more than once and didn’t fix the inequity in the tax system. It favors the wealthy. Dems and Repugs spend most of their time serving the rich. Obama boasts that he will raise $1 billion in campaign funds – most from the corporations who bad-mouth him. The political system has failed. Period.
But think about how the corporations buy the system. They buy it with campaign contributions. Two ways to fix that: either (1) voters wise up and stop paying attention to the political ads (which is what all that campaign money buys), or (2) Limit campaign spending to some fixed dollar amount.
Option (1) won’t work because there are too many people who are uneducated enough that they buy into all that negative advertising, and always will. Which leaves option (2)
So let’s say we limit campaign spending. I don’t have a number in mind, but make it big enough to support a small staff, travel expenses, legal and miscellaneous expenses, etc. But small enough that there’s not enough money left to run any TV or radio ads, and small enough that every candidate has a reasonable chance or raising enough money to hit the limit.
When you do that, the lobbyists and corporations lose all their power. Then they can’t buy the system anymore.
That’s step 1.
Not a bad idea, Zach. But since the supreme court ruled that corporations are people, it won’t work until that ruling is overturned.
– Trish
But that’s just it – it’s a spending limit, not a contribution limit. Whether the corporations are people or not, it doesn’t matter – they can donate as much as they want, but the candidate can only spend up to $N, where N is big enough to pay the bills, but small enough that they can’t buy the election, and small enough that any candidate with a reasonable amount of public support will be able to reach the limit with ease – with or without corporate donations. And once they’ve spent the limit, anything left over gets donated to a charity of the candidates choice. And of course there has to be strict auditing and accounting for all expenses and donations.
And as a nice side effect, this gives us a chance to see how well the candidate can handle a budget and limit spending to what’s necessary. If they overspend too early, they run out of money and their campaign dies
It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s a start. And that’s only step one.
I do agree. Limiting spending is one way to limit access to our pols. The problem is, I have lost all hope that there is leader in the bunch. They all seem archaic to me. Their talking points and solutions do not seem to fit this century and it’s problems.
Yeah, they live in the dark ages, in the time of dinosaurs, they are completely disconnected from the real world.
And regardless of what anyone thinks of protests, without them, we would probably still be in vietnam.
-Trish
I agree. The protests are better than nothing, because people interpret silence to mean consent. Because people did not rise up to protest the 2000 election results, we ended up with Bush being sworn in as president despite losing the popular vote and the voting fraud in Florida.
It is naive to think that elections solve our problems, because incumbents are notoriously hard to get rid of. Where I live in Portland, very few people liked Congressman Wu, yet he easily defeated primary challengers and wins the general election because he is a Democrat in a Democratic leaning district. It took a series of revelations and a sex scandal to force him to resign his office so that new people can run.
What I’ve learned is that people generally like their representative in Congress. Its the other districts’ representatives that they don’t like! If it was easy to get rid of incumbents, it would happen more often.
To change our system, the best way is economic boycott of corporations and supporting locally owned small business. However, people like their discounts and cheap goods that are sold in big chain stores. In South Africa, it was the economic boycott that helped force a change on that country’s political system, not the massive internal protests. When rich people’s financial livelihood get threatened, you’ll see change happen. Until then, it’ll be the same old, same old.
>>What I’ve learned is that people generally like their representative in Congress.
We don’t care for our tea party rep., the guy we wrote about in the Co-exist post. What a jerk.
Here’s a great line coming out of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. “I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.”
I remember that CNN didn’t even bother covering the protests of 10 million people worldwide when we invaded iraq. So it’s not just the protests, but the media attention that may
help to tip things.
wow – another of those posts that induced one of those strong visceral responses with me – chills and goosebumps – in the most literal sense – i would so love to drive over to dc this weekend to join forces there –
great post –
If you do, take pics!!
and still America went in the direcion it did….. the 99%’ers (are incorrect about that) have some points but their also missing a few…. if 99% of the population can’t create 90% on the better mousetraps that will be invented in the next 5 years well,,,,,
Maybe if they had jobs, they could.
The interesting thing about this movement, though, is that didn’t it begin with a small group of people who said that they were inspired by the Arab Spring and planned to camp out in Wall Street for however long it took to change the economic structure of our country? If this is true, that means the young college-educated man in Tunisia who had to make a living selling fruit in Tunis and was humiliated by a cop and petitioned the Tunisian government to no avail, and then deciding to set himself afire in protest to that regime, has really caused a huge ripple in our planetary consciousness!!! He is the same as the man who stood in front of four tanks in Tiananman Square in June 1989.
The movement in the 1960s did affect the government and society, as you can see by how anti-war protests are dismissed by the media and the elite as people wanting to relive the hippie days of the 1960s. There’s a level of sneering scorn by the elite that any mass movement to protest the way our society is, is merely a desire for people to “relive the 60s”, which is ridiculous.
Another irony is that the Afghanistan War in the 1980s helped to speed up the economic demise of the USSR. Looks like Afghanistan has done it again to another Empire. Hopefully, our capitalist system will be reformed into a more ethical economic system. Interestingly enough, Karl Marx predicted that the demise of capitalism would come when the exploitation reached a certain level. When you have huge unemployment, what else can the people do? Protest is better than moping at home or playing Xbox!
I really hope that this movement will continue to grow and scare the corporate capitalists into making real changes.
Good points. Get ridding of the lobbyists would be a great place to start this reform!
Not sure where my reply went. I approved it before I approved your comment, Nicholas!