The following excerpt was originally featured on Alternet.org.
Looking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t want to merely fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. For the American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice, “I wasn’t put here on earth to sell product.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to increase market share.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to make numbers grow.”
We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.
No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street, no one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1% as well. We have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can create.
Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars, regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren’t quite what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary. Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a force but a call. Our message is, “Stop pretending. You know what to do. Start doing it.” Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don’t beat him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden.
If politicians are disconnected from the real world of human suffering and ecosystem collapse, all the more disconnected are the financial wizards of Wall Street. Behind their computer screens, they occupy a world of pure symbol, manipulating numbers and computer bits. Occupy Wall Street punctures their bubble of pretense as well, reconnects them with the human consequences of the god they serve, and perhaps with their own consciences and humanity too. Only in a hallucination could someone imagine that the unsustainable can last forever; in puncturing their bubble, we remind them that the money game is nearing its end. It can be perpetuated for a while longer, perhaps, but only at great and growing cost. We, the 99%, are paying that cost right now, and as the environment and the social fabric decay, the 1% will soon feel it too. We want those who operate and serve the financial system to wake up and see before it is too late.
Click here to view the full article on AlterNet.org
Image by NLNY on Flickr Courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing
Charles’ sentiments are lovely, however, he’s a little myopic on one, key point; “Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. ”
They are not beholden to impersonal forces. That’s like saying “money” is the only thing that motivates their actions. Its not. Money is a locus of control that is used by individuals, groups, sects, secret societies and corporations.
OWS needs to get down to brass tacks, because they’re getting brass knuckles now. May as well lay it all out on the line.
Its the Rothschilde/Queen of England/Rockefeller network, fronted by NGOs, foundations and trusts and corporations (again).
Their goal is to dismantle capitalism, while remaining in the catbird seat and controlling not just wealth, but the vast resources of the planet including humanity itself.
Well meaning and soulful pieces like this can inspire but ultimately don’t serve to root out the tumor choking off our collective spirit.
I get this criticism all the time, but in fact I have read deeply in the conspiracy literature. My belief that the elite is the puppet of the system, and not the other way around, is not the result of ignorance of the material you reference. I went there and ultimately found it unsatisfying and, what’s more, psychologically disempowering. This doesn’t mean I think such a conspiracy doesn’t exist, or that it does exist. The article “Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order” presents my view in greater depth.
Also, I want to make it clear that I believe action on many levels is necessary: community, personal, social, political. When I speak of a shift of consciousness, it is not a substitute for action, but rather the foundation for action.
Charles
oops, forgot to give the link to the article. http://www.realitysandwich.com/synchronicity_myth_and_new_world_order