You know I just had to grab a moment to love on the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Some, mostly White, young adults got tired of the madness and unfairness of our economic and political system and just decided to stop everything and sit down near the biggest financial exchange in the world to make their voices heard. Sometimes, we New Yorkers don't stop and think about all the serious power that runs through these streets and how the misdeeds on Wall St. echo in a fishing village in Madagascar.
Finally, people got tired of the union busting, privatization of the education and the criminal justice systems, the tax-free dealings with corporations, the no-bid contracts with our city's Dept. of Education and yes, the rent is too damn high and all the rest of the BS we're left to deal with in our everyday survival. Yes it's survival right about now; when money is funny, sh*t gets real. Now we're left with a corporate democracy which basically means, be glad you've got a job and a roof over your head and don't complain about the 1%'s control of our economic and political system.
I like that they don't have an agenda. They just decided to stop and sit down. Maybe they'll come up with a platform and an agenda but at least they started something on the state of our system. It's sad it takes people to catch a little bit of hell before they confront the system. This recession is what many Black people and the forgotten poor go through on the daily. They just put a name (the recession) on their everyday existence: robbing Peter to pay Paul; trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents; lay-away plans. That's been us all along and we just accepted that that's how life is. But I'm glad it took this group of people to say it's wrong and we don't have to tolerate it with our silence and passivity. Sadly, when you stand up in a "supposed" democracy and challenge your government and its monetary policies, the demons wake up. The police brutality and the 700 people arrested made me seethe, and this was right after Chase Bank donated $4 million dollars to our city's police department. Did the police lieutenants feel good about themselves for snatching up defenseless women who were in a non-violent protest. This, not long after our police commissioner brags that he could take down a plane if there were another terrorist attack. And the media doesn't even question that shit. Like hello, that's not for a local police agency, that's for our federal and state militia's responsibility and capability. If that's what the police did to young white females at a peaceful protest, I wonder what would happen if there were more black and brown faces down there. That is a rhetorical question.
I was down there a couple of weeks ago and although it's not as large as I thought it to be from the news coverage, it was great to see them rallying and expressing their frustration. Funny, I remember sitting in that park during my college summer break 20 years ago on my lunch hour listening to a crack addicted, homeless comedian tell shamelessly raunchy jokes for all the secretaries, brokers and bankers on their lunch hours before we all headed back to our grinds. Those jokes were a nice reprieve from the stuffy, tight air I had to inhale while I made some money at a summer job. But now those jokes and the light air have gone and you can feel the heaviness and seriousness of the times we're living in. The atmosphere there felt like they picked up on where the 2008 election left off. Obama has had successes, contrary to what the mainstream media now likes to promote. He "got" Osama Bin Laden, got some healthcare reform in, put 2 women on the High Court and extended unemployment benefits before. He hasn't done all he could and I think the budget cap was what took us all over the edge. Watching him capitulate to the Republicans made me cringe. He could've ended it all, yet did what he felt had to be done as the ever-bipartisan leader. I've never seen anything like it, and that's not a compliment. But be that as it may, it triggered this movement in my opinion, where people finally said, "OK we put him in, he can't do it all, so what can we do?" And the fact that they chose not to sit-in on Capital Hill makes me smile. Politicians come and go but they were smart to see that power is seated where the dollar lies. And even if they're not directly on Wall Street, but 2 or so blocks away, you can't ignore their presence.
Then the right talks about class warfare as if this is something new. The constitution only extended the right to vote to "propertied" white males. Meaning you need to first be a white guy who owns a patch of dirt and paying some taxes to have a right to participate in the government. Since Ronald Reagan's first term he used the power of his Hollywood iconic communication style to seduce much of the American public to vote against their own interests. Poor and middle class whites identified with his message and became Conservative Republicans, as if they shared a common status with the elites, say like the Koch Brothers. Who have been the one's sent to fight in America's wars, work shitty jobs without benefits or carry the tax burden.? The poor. When Warren Buffet is willing to pay more taxes because his secretary has a higher tax rate than he does you know it's bad. But people have been so used to just rolling over and accepting this rigged game that we haven't seen people en masse in the last 30 years unite, organize and sit-in for more than a day's march on Washington.
But all politicians should be on alert, cause this movement just might turn to them and start asking tough questions of what specifically they've done legislatively for job creation and housing. (Hint Mr. Jesse Jackson, Jr.) People are losing their homes yet banks are getting bailed out, and then they've the nerve to raise their ATM fees. We need to start making little changes they'll pay attention to like closing our bank accounts and putting our money into Credit Unions. How about the Citibank that had several people arrested who lined up to close their accounts in the Midwest? When we begin to talk about empowered financial changes individually and collectively, they listen like EF Hutton.
So the Arab world set it off in the Spring, we jumped on in the Fall and now we're testing the strength of our democratic ideals and our united resolve for consistency. Let's not make this episodic. Let's open our ears, study our own movement and what the real strategies were, stop shopping like it's gonna make all life's pain go away and participate in this moment. We can't afford to go to work and just go home anymore as poverty gets more entrenched and it gets harder for people to work their way out of the pit of poverty with a decent school system for their kids, affordable housing and a living wage.
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