OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
At the top of the city
in a glass-chromed room
an attorney assures the board of directors
that the corporation is the person
against which any or all action may be taken,
not against each and every director joint or several.
The multi-headed person exhales dry-iced victory
as counsel backs out the door
descending floor after floor
to wait for a cab in the cold.
Nearby, a breathing bundle of rags
sits on a grate of steam
and waits, just waits,
wondering where warmth went.
—Ruth Knight, “Persons”
As she often does, Naomi Klein cuts to the core of an essential issue. The Occupy protests comprise people of many races, religious affiliations, socioeconomic statuses, and nationalities. The protestors have a variety of grievances they would like addressed, but I believe, as does Ms. Klein, that the fundamental issue is one of values.
Most of the critical aspects of our lives have been commodified. Nothing is sacred and everything is for sale. Science, education, healthcare, war, and many other areas historically associated with either lofty ideals or primal needs have been co-opted by the ethos of big business.
At the same time, human beings have been marginalized and dehumanized, while, ironically, inhuman entities have been aggrandized and granted person-hood. The world is upside down and many are now prepared to begin addressing the issues required to restore balance to our lives.
Our values are the foundation of our society. They define the types of citizens we produce and shape the characteristics of the systems that ultimately uphold and regulate our civilization. Corruption of our values will necessarily result in the development of corrupt systems. This is the fundamental issue that lies at the heart of our discontent.
Change will require us to ask ourselves difficult questions. Who are we? What do we truly care about? What kind of world do we want to see for ourselves and our children? It’s not too late for real change to occur, but it will require patience, tolerance, open-mindedness and the will to sacrifice.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
- Lawrence and Andrew Wachowski
For many young people, traditional sources of security and stability have been swept away. Broken homes, pedophilic clergymen, inadequate educations and mercenary government representatives have helped remove the ballast from modern life. In response, Generation X and their successors have turned to each other for commiseration and support.
They know the truth. The confluence of myriad forces has engendered the creation of a new type of citizen, one that is acutely aware of what they are and the nature of the world they inhabit.
They realize that the current system is fatally flawed. They do not want to change it. They do not want to reform it. They want to dismantle it. Continue reading
Real change is here, and we are not alone. You are not alone.
We stand at a unique time in our history. The rise of the Internet and computing technology have contributed to an unparalleled rate of prosperity for the First World.
We have created for ourselves an empire unlike any other, a global network of constant trade and communication, a new age of technological advancement. We have come a long way from our humble roots in the Industrial Revolution and the days of Manifest Destiny. We are now pioneers on new digital frontiers expanding our domain from the quantum world to the far reaches of space.
And yet, the empire faces a crisis, a global recession, growing poverty, rampant violence, corruption in politics, and threats to personal freedom. As it was before in other times of crisis, the old stories have begun to repeat themselves. The half truths, this time repeated nightly on cable news and echoed through a series of tubes onto the Internet: the empire is strong, change is unwise, business as usual is the answer. In times of uncertainty there are those who seek to add to the confusion, to prey on our insecurities and fears. Those who would seek to keep us divided for their own gain. The pervasive strategy takes many very convincing forms: Liberals and Conservatives, Christians and Muslims, Black and White, Saved and Sinner.
But something unexpected is happening. We have begun telling each other our own stories. Sharing our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our demons. Every second, day in day out, into all hours of the night the gritty details of life on this earth are streaming around the world. As we see the lives of others played out in our living rooms we are beginning to understand the consequences of our actions and the error of the old ways. We are questioning the old assumptions that we are made to consume not to create, that the world was made for our taking, that wars are inevitable, that poverty is unavoidable. As we learn more about our global community a fundamental truth has been rediscovered: We are not so different as we may seem. Every human has strengths, weaknesses, and deep emotions. We crave love, love laughter, fear being alone and dream for a better life.
You must create a better life.
You cannot sit on the couch watching television or playing video games, waiting for revolution. You are the revolution. Every time you decide not to exercise your rights, every time you refuse to hear another point of view, every time you ignore the world around you, every time you spend a dollar at a business that doesn’t pay a fair wage you are contributing to the oppression of the human body and the repression of the human mind. You have a choice, a choice to take the easy path, the familiar path, to walk willingly into your own submission. Or a choice get up, to go outside and talk to your neighbor, to come together in new forums to create lasting, meaningful change for the human race.
This is our challenge:
A peaceful revolution, a revolution of ideas, a revolution of creation. The twenty-first century enlightenment. A global movement to create a new age of tolerance and understanding, empathy and respect. An age of unfettered technological development. An age of sharing ideas and cooperation. An age of artistic and personal expression. We can choose to use new technology for radical positive change or let it be used against us. We can choose to keep the Internet free, keep channels of communication open and dig new tunnels into those places where information is still guarded. Or we can let it all close in around us. As we move in to new digital worlds, we must acknowledge the need for honest information and free expression. We must fight to keep the Internet open as a marketplace of ideas where all are seated as equals. We must defend our freedoms from those who would seek to control us. We must fight for those who do not yet have a voice. Keep telling your story. All must be heard.
For In The Choice Between Continued Slavery And Freedom There Simply Can Be No Choice.
We Are Anonymous.
We Are Legion.
We Do Not Forgive.
We Do Not Forget.
Expect Us.
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.
Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness, hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery, we need humanity.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder.
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men.
Caveat: The phrase “they” is going to be used many times throughout this post. It is meant to serve as a placeholder, and can be substituted by any individual or group that fits the criteria described in the first few paragraphs. It is representative of a strategy, a set of behaviors that naturally extend from specific, core values that can be present from the most local, personal level, to the national and global levels. In all likelihood, you probably have someone that embodies these characteristics in your workplace, i.e., a painfully average individual that, while relatively poor in body and spirit, parrots the rhetoric of the rarefied elite that run the global economy, and hence, the world. Continue reading
Bruce Sterling, acclaimed science fiction writer, gives his take on the abstruse Julian Assange:
He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us.
Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.
Even though, as major political players go, Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses, most wannabe martyrs, are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian; clearly, he doesn’t lack for lust and burning resentment, but that kind of gregarious, sweaty political tactility is beneath his dignity. He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.
“Living fearlessly is not the same thing as never being afraid. It’s good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher. What’s not good is living in fear, allowing fear to define who you are. Living fearlessly means standing up to fear, taking its measure, refusing to let it shape and define your life.” — Michael Ignatieff (1947-)
