I suppose any progressive writer worth his salt, must start off any article with a reference to occupy wall street. I am nowhere near an iconoclast as those good people sleeping out in the frigid wild of liberty plaza, so I will observe protocol.
Here goes.
Occupy wall street, you beauty. You are the embodiment of hope, the fulfillment of yearning, the return on investment made over years and decades by fighters solitary, and movements small, and marches ephemeral and causes unconnected. You have been mocked and scorned and derided as being hippies. You beat drums in circles. But in doing so you scared us. You started the docile sheep that are herded by corporate dogs into their cubicles and their faulty insurance plans and their underwater mortgages. But they are scared so they baaa at you in derision.
These sheep have no pasture because it has been razed by the shepherd. But they, comfortable in being shorn of their wool, mock you who have taken off your wollen coats. They want you to dress like they do and look like they do: To cut your dreads, not to wear tye dye, not to wear masks and beat drums and to only shred your guitars for corporate rock, but never to play a protest folk song. They want you to get a list of demands so that they can stroke your head like you are a recalcitrant child, and wink over your head at the other grownups, and send you to your room with vague promises and then shred your demands in the same machinery that grounds up your contemporaries in the dustbeds of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They look at your signs, somehow magically as large as crop circles, but mysteriously residing on donated pizza boxes and are dismayed to find that no three of your signs in an area the size of a squared circle, carry the same message. Because make no mistake: they want you to carry the same signs, have only one message.
Because they face forward, their views filled with only survival and selfishness that they have been told is their lot in life and their salvation. You, with your global worldview is an affront to them.
How can you- how dare you- care about suffering iraqis, veterans, homeless, the American elderly, the capitalism ravaged Haitians, the bullied LBGTs, the debt burdened students, and the forgotten poor- all the same time! That’s how they divide you and muffle your cries.
They want you to have only one issue; they know empathy removes blinders. They know that the love of money is the tar sands derived crude that fuels the good ship wall street , is the most efficient delivery system for evil- and that all of the evils together corded up in the holds of that ship like so many blacks slaves in times past. They know if all of you protesting all the evils protest them together, stack them one on top the other, they will reach the heavens, a modern day tower of Babel, threatening the gods of plunder and avarice. And the establishment liberals let the establishment liberals sneer as they, tongues hanging out of their mouths, pant for the ambrosia that trickles down from their modern day mount Olympus-wall street . Nectar of the gods indeed! But even the gods on mount Olympus could not have sat on such treasure as they do today. So they let some treasure drip, slowly, down to the democratic party in the form of naked bribes, which they attempt to disguise dress like a cheap whore in expensive dress which they call lobbying. And like that ambrosia of old, it turns them into gods. These young gods are as unable to abrogate the intoxication of that elixir as they are unable to shed the oily, noxious, writhing veneer of disdain for the shaggy haired, drum beating, finger wiggling, 90 percent general assembly having, beacons of light that you are .
They say that the winds of the artic will sweep down, freeze your will, and blow you away like chaff, along with your message.
They say you will not last.
They say that the police- call them mercenaries, because soon they will take their future and their pensions, and pay them by the hour- but they say those mercenaries will feed you the mist of pepper and roughage of batons and you will not last. They say that you will be arrested one by one till your will is broken by fines and swallowed by the yawning chasm of the judicial pit hole. You can not last.
But You will last.
I do not doubt your longevity. Because your living capital is no longer bound up in the continued sacrifice of beds and TVs and video games and showers and hot food and plumbing and the other pacifiers that they who would rule your soul and legislate spirit, trust to keep you pliant and servile.
You will last because you have planted a seed. That seed you planted is now drifting lightly on the soaring wind. And the thing about those arctic winds if that while they might freeze you, and shatter you at liberty park, they will lift up those shards and scatter them and bear those seeds to Texas, Taiwan, Australia and Sao Paolo. And unlike a Monsanto seed, you ask no royalty on the fruits, except that they be consumed and used for energy to fuel the movement.
And because they have ploughed us and reaped all we have to give and more, the world is fertile, receptive ground. So, the fruit will grow, in and out of season. It will grow in the season of war, in the season of child slavery, in the season of ocean poisoning, in the season of disaster capitalism in the season of…in the season of pain.
The world celebrates your arrival, occupy wall street, and we wait- together- and work- together- and you will make this world over in your image.
