Great to wake up to the band playing, and the streets of Manhattan filled with people singing, “We’re not gonna take it, no, we’re not gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it, anymore!!” when we found out the park won’t be “cleaned” after all.
All movements in the world started from people. Kings, pharoahs and monarchs were ALWAYS content with the status quo, and millions of people had millions of reasons for complying with the status quo for long periods at a time, until they decided the status quo was unbearable and revolution was in order. So we need to make the message simple enough for an 8-year-old to understand. Once enough people see the simple truth that, without them, the emperor has no clothes, then the emperor no longer rules the people: the people rule the emperor. Bloomberg and all the politicians will be caught chasing the narrative and trying to spin it to their personal advantage, but people have to create the narrative and lead the politicians, rather than following the politicians, and letting them set the narrative.
For the doubters and the haters and the trolls out there, that are not nearly as abundant as our major media outlets try to make it appear, I ask:
Has sitting at home by yourself biting your nails over the loss of your 401K been working for you?
Has dutifully smiling and sending out 300 resumes a month while you have piles of student debt been working for you?
O.k, to the virtuous who went to community college and have no student debt and no mortgage debt who tell these protesters to “get a job”–do you have a job that will lead anywhere but on a treadmill to nowhere for the next 50 years?
Your wages have stagnated for 30 years–that means they have NOT INCREASED AT ALL, while your work output (production) has.
The increase in your productivity while you sweat at $8 or even $20 bucks an hour has gone only to the TOP.
Corporations are sitting on mounds have cash and have no care how many people can’t find jobs. It is not their job to create demand for their services by employing more people who in turn can buy more. Only governments (i.e, PEOPLE, not corporations) can care for the larger general welfare–all the parts of life and society that are larger than the tiny confines of the factory or bank walls. The corporations are designed to make money, only–that is why we have a Constitution, and a government: to promote the general welfare.
Yet when a government is bought out by corporations, it, like the corporation, refuses to see the broader welfare. It defines life narrowly only based on the measures of what is happening inside the walls of the corporations and the balance sheet of banks. That narrow definition ignores the plight of joblessness, hunger, and debt, as “not my problem.”
When government becomes as unresponsive as corporations to the suffering of the people, the only recourse is to take to the streets and raise your voices. Or, suffer silently, and quietly die in the corner without inconveniencing the corporations and governments, which they would prefer. Those who hate and dismiss the protesters are doing the job of unresponsive government. Nice work. People can always be counted on to do the work of their oppressors and to vote against their true best interest.
Your life is short, and you may wake up one day to find it over, and that you lived on the wrong side of history. Or, like Troy Davis, Joe Hill, and Martin Luther King, you may find that though your body left the earth, you never died, because too many people keep the fight for justice alive.
Shelved in Cyberspace 