Thursday, November 17, 2011

happy anniversary, OW!

i shouldn't be here posting right now; i should be at the Charlestown bridge with the marchers. but general malaise and bad weather won, so here i am, yelling 'right on' to the TV and gushing gratitude for the folks hardier and braver than i. damn, they're beautiful!

a friend recently commented on one of my posts, citing the report that local businesses have banded together to protest the protest, which was driving customers away by making lots of noise and being filthy and smelly. his source was fox news, which leads me to believe that, at best, the reports were exaggerated. fox news is a great source of fiction, but if they told me the sun was shining at noon, i'd go outside and check it for myself. when the supposed problems included piss and shit on the streets, i could only conclude that this was invented or imagined---not b/c it couldn't happen, but b/c from all reports i've seen about the occupiers everywhere they have been highly concerned about being respectful of the community, and would have instantly addressed any such complaints and watched out for repetitions of them.

i keep hearing news reports of 'violence' from the demonstrators, and seeing violence from the police on the videos.

today, it appears, a couple of police officers were indeed injured; 3 were hospitalized, as were 10--that's 10--protesters. maybe a couple of occupiers broke their own rules and fought back. but i am reminded of richard nixon's cynical use of police violence back in that famous chicago democratic convention: a dramatic voiceover talked about the danger of these violent demonstrators, while the videos showed violence and chaos. only when you really looked st the videos, it was the police, not the protesters, committing the violence.

sadly, the police seem to be increasingly violent. under orders, i would imagine, since they started off fairly benignly.

so, they have shut down several of the occupations. maybe, between arrests and stealing the occupiers winter supplies, they'll end up closing down all the sites.

and then?

the occupiers have been brilliant--how many of us really believed even the original wall street occupation would last over a week, let alone 2 months, let alone mushrooming into hundreds and hundreds of occupations countrywide and worldwide? does anyone really think the people who could create and expand such an incredible endeavor are going drift off into obscurity? i don't know what their next plans are. i do know that for every one occupier living and sleeping in public spaces, there are a dozen or a hundred [like our republican candidates, my math is bad] of us who support them, who have learned a lot from them, who understand the rightness of their cause. with every foreclosed house, every laid off worker, every hungry kid, more and more people are realizing that something needs to be done, and that something doesn't mean making the corporate-people richer at our expense.

so happy anniversary again to you wonderful, flesh-and-blood people who have subjected yourselves to so much physical discomfort to help the rest of us to see and resolve, in whatever ways, to fight. you knew from the first that this was bigger than any one occupation. i look forward to the next steps you come up with. much as the powers that want to think you're a fad that will fade away, most of us know that until other fads--humanoid corporations, rich ceo's, all the mechanisms of oppression that have kept the 99% down and unaware--until these decade- and century-old 'fads' are addressed and redressed, you'll be around, morphing in the ways you will keep recreating.....

1 comment:

Bob Lamm said...

Great statement, Karen.