We all need to support #OWS

In early October, Suzanne and I had a run in with the police. It was a silly moment on Broadway on the east side of Zuccotti Park. The large police man needed to push us off the sidewalk if we weren’t taking pictures or waiting for a bus. I wasn’t blocking the traffic on the sidewalk, no one had asked me to get out of the way except this officious cop. I stood my ground for a while and then Suzanne decided we didn’t need to be arrested over something so stupid. She was, as usual, correct.

I got into an angry funk for a while. But Suzanne, as always, wanted to be helpful and so we went looking for a place where she could contribute some money. We walked back to a table we had stopped at before and tried to find someone who could take the money from us. While I waited for Suzanne to finish her conversation with someone, a man came barreling through the park wearing a button-down oxford shirt and carrying a large briefcase which he rammed right into my knee. In response, I stuck out my foot to try and trip him. Then, I realized that wasn’t a very Christian thing to do and righted him so he wouldn’t fall. He walked away in some angry huff and turned back to stare at me. I had no idea who he was but he knew who he was and it seemed to be a further insult that I didn’t recognize him.

Yesterday I saw his picture in an article. It was Andrew Breitbart. I found that funny now, 3 weeks later, but at the time, he and I were both steaming about different things. He most likely was steaming because of the great work that was happening in the park. I was steaming because of that dumb cop and his need to push us around for no reason other than he could.

It is certain that both the cop and Breitbart hate the kind of community-based, organic organizing that goes on daily down in Liberty Plaza. This is foreign to their goals in life. They perceive it as an infection rather than a cure. Having been raised on the belief in winner take all, they can’t comprehend what it means to want to work with groups of people to form a better way of life. For them, their lives are just fine, now please just move along.

Having a country that had until just a few weeks ago been totally enamored of a kind of sports analogy for all of life, this new life form growing at Liberty Plaza must seem totally unAmerican and unhealthy. It forces people on the news to warn the president not to support it because some anonymous large group of voters, whom they have never met or spoken to, will not like it. That is the fun today when watching the news, listening to the people who never leave their control rooms or broadcast booths except to talk to others in the same business tell me what I will or will not like.

How do they know these things? I have images in my mind of these hypocritical newspeople holding up phony lists of information given to them by the Bush Administration supporting the invasion of Iraq. They will believe anything they are told to believe so long as it will ensure the continuance of their hefty paychecks.

You can’t go into a diner here in NYC without being bombarded by the business tv shows. It is frightening. Do the people who go to these diners really care what the infamous Jim Cramer has to say? For all I know, they don’t even know who he is or how wrong he was about the recent financial meltdowns. But in his business, which is business reporting, you don’t ever have to be right, you just have to support the view that Wall Street and the banks are what is good for the USA.

While down in Liberty Plaza and many other cities, people are sitting down to serious discussions about how to fix this mess we have been given by people who work not very far away or unknown to many of us.

Fall always carries a certain amount of fear in the air. Whether of the hobgoblins who lurk in costumes waiting for a good amount of treats to delay the tricks or just of the shortening of the daylight it is a time of great upheaval. Now in Europe, the greater upheaval for them is trying to be addressed and never seems to find its conclusion. The reason is simple–no one wants to admit who is at fault and thus who should have to take the hit. One clue–it isn’t the tax payer. One more clue, they are working very hard to figure out how the tax payer will be picking up the tab.

The same here. The banks may be paying huge bonuses to some of their executives, but we, you and I, are soon going to be picking up the tab for what the fools at Bank of America allowed to happen. They will be laughing all the way home, while we, you and I, will be paying for their stupidity and greed.

Or, we can help those down in Liberty Plaza and all over the world who want to put an end to this type of grandiose greed. Let’s bring the bankers out of their protected worlds and make them do what we do all day and all night, worry about where we will be if our health insurance is cancelled or we lose our jobs or our homes. Or that some insane trader decides because he can that he wants to take down the entire system and cause a global disaster. You know things are bad when that is a distinct possibility.

We give of what we have and we work to bring this whole cloth of humanity back to a healthy state not for a few but for the many. That is what the bankers, the traders, the pundits and the cops don’t seem to understand. It is not a “me” culture anymore. We are on the threshold of becoming one people, again.