You know what’s the crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Occupy Wall Street
I like it and I hate it.
I like it because it is America at it’s very essence. I hate it because there’s obviously a disconnect in this country right now and it seems that half the nation doesn’t understand what the other half of the country is experiencing.
The best America is a united America and right now, we are a fractured nation limping along a conveyor belt spinning aimlessly in place.
America is like a golf ball. It’s exterior is hard and full of dimples of perfect spherical imperfection. But when you slice through America’s hard outer shell, what you find inside is the rubbery guts of what makes America great; it’s people. And when you unwind 10 miles of stringy, rubbery, elastic innards, what you finally get is a rock hard super ball that is harder and tighter than a black hole collapsing upon itself.
WE THE PEOPLE!
That is the core and that is where the concentrated anger is emanating. It’s like a neutron star of compressed anger broiling, churning, poised to implode and then mushroom cloud out of control.
What started on Wall Street as a protest over economic inequity has spread like a contagion across this nation. From Anchorage to Las Vegas to Nashville the chord of discontent can be felt in the streets.
It’s called Occupy Wall Street. The anger, the chants, the fervent passion embodies the spirit of what this nation was founded on.
America, if nothing else, is a 235 year experiment in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom to stand up and dissent.
The Boston Tea Party. Vietnam. The Civil Rights Protests.
I HAVE A DREAM!
In New York City, , the fertile crescent of this movement, the protest is in its fourth week.
From the Big Apple it spread past the bears and bulls of Wall Street. Like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the movement is now a global force.
If there was a paved road in Antarctica, penguins and Eskimos would gather there and burn whale blubber in protest of a global economy that is polarizing the haves and have nots. Nobody is happy.
The signs scribbled in magic marker on cardboard are poignant. “the rich get bailed out while the poor get sold out”
It’s a statement about greedy banks and corporations that steam roll over real people cutting our benefits and our 401 k’s.
The financial divide is grand canyon like and people are pissed.
There’s palpable anger and if it isn’t lanced soon it’s going to fester and explode and it is going to be ugly.
And that too is America.
There have been some arrests, but by and large, considering how many people are protesting, the violence has been marginal.
This is truly an awakening, a grass roots movement.
It’s Howard Beale shouting into his live TV mic screaming I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.
It’s people opening up their windows and shouting at the sky “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”
The right to scream I’m mad as hell is exactly why we fought the American Revolution. Oh I know it was no taxation without representation, but it was really about freedom.
It was a war waged so we could stand on our soap box and wear our sandwich board signs and howl at the moon.
The howls are being heard across the pond.
In Dublin on Dane Street – the equivalent of Ireland’s Wall Street – people are outside the central bank and they are protesting Occupy Wall Street.
They’re gathering across the continents because our problem is their problem and their problem is our problem.
Teddy Roosevelt’s practice of isolationism is a nice 20th century philosophy, but it aint’ gonna work in this Facebook connected world.
From Houston to Washington D.C. to San Francisco, what has set the fuse on the anger of so many?
Is it greed? Is it accountability? Is it fiscal hopelessness?
If this was the 60’s every protester would be a college age, bell bottom wearing, reefer smoking hippie. They’d be bellowing through a bull horn about “no justice no peace” or “burn baby burn”.
But this is 2011 and protests are undeniably different. On a recent Sunday in NYC, a scan of the iphone texting crowd showed every race creed color and age.
To one Virginia father of four, he has been in this city park camping out for days. Why?
“I almost lost my home,” he says. “I know people who have lost their homes. It’s hard to afford food,” he says.
Will Hopkins, an Iraq War Vet has laid his life on the line for freedom. He too is in the park.
“We’re upset about the way business is being done,” he says.
Beautifully put. It is about business. The business of living. the business of corporations squatting on the little guy and crapping all over us like we don’t matter.
If that’s their business, then it’s time to change the way business is conducted.
I don’t condone the violence. I don’t like the fact that protesters stormed the air and space museum. Really, the air and space museum? Why not storm the Betsy Ross flag museum.
Losers.
But that too is America. Anytime you put so many people into a small space all burning with different degrees of crazy passion, sometimes something is going to blow.
Put a hand grenade in a phone booth and someone is going to get bloody.
The message on Wall Street was messy, convoluted at first. But it is starting to crystallize:
FRUSTRATION WITH THE ECONOMY AND THE LACK OF CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY.
And the movement is gaining traction and a political slant.
Virginia Republican Eric Cantor derided the protests referring to the people as a mob.
He expressed dismay that some in this town (Washington) have condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrat Nancy Pelosi countered; “I didn’t see him saying anything when the tea party was out demonstrating and actually spitting on members of the congress.”
And God Bless the Tea Party too! People activating, demonstrating, doing what the damn constitution let’s us do.
We don’t have to climb a statue of Abe Lincoln and pull it to the ground and fire AK 47’s into the air and howl like sheep. We are Americans, we wrote the book on democratic insubordination.
So in some ways, it is John Q Public vs The American Dream. It’s the right to protest versus the status quo. It’s corporate greed vs people who have nothing left to lose.
Herman Cain doesn’t seem to be one to back down does he: “Don’t blame Wall Street or the rich, blame yourself.”
I love it.
Hard felt. An upper cut to the medulla oblingada. Go get em America.
Protest loud and protest quiet. Get out in the streets and wave your flag or stay home and drink Jack from the bottle. Who cares. Everyone cares. What a great country.
It’s ok to be angry. It’s ok to be discontent. It’s ok to say shut up I’m watching Dancing with the Stars.
I’m sort of angry. I’m sort of not. I don’t feel like protesting. But I would like to bake Bank of America a giant cake made with Ex Lax.
How dare they discount me and charge me for using my own money via a debit card.
What would John Quincy Adams do?
I understand the anger. I understand America wanting to voice its opinion.
It’s what makes us great, it is what makes us strong, it’s what makes us America.
And that is crazy.™