So I haven’t written about #occupybaltimore in awhile. I don’t feel the need to justify why, since I’m way too busy to keep up a regular blogging schedule anyway. Regardless, today is the second full day of a 7 day fast I am engaging in for clarity of mind about occupy, and I think things are starting to come together. This isn’t going to be a particularly nice piece, but I think everything here needs to be said.
A month and change into #occupybaltimore, I need to express some frustration, some bliss, and some wrath. Where to start? Get it together people. Anyone living under the occupy banner needs to be part of the cause. This doesn’t mean we need to agree about everything, far from it, but we have to agree to some basic principles: consensus decision making, tolerance of other’s ideals, public obedience of laws where disobedience is not political speech (fundamentally: no drug use), and finally nonviolence. Simply put, anyone that steps outside of the bounds of these rules has NO place associating with Occupy. We have enough trouble with the hurdles ahead as our movement faces winter and the “serious people” of the political world, we cannot be dragged down by internal strife. Individuals who refuse to follow these exceedingly simple rules have no place and occupy and need to be removed, as quickly and peacefully as possible. This may mean getting homeless services on site for your local occupation, because they are much better equipped to address these chronic issues, and we are not funded, trained, or otherwise setup to handle that kind of role.
Occupy is really making a difference in the world, anyone who denies it is probably doing so for self interested reasons, because the change in dialogue alone is significant. The longer we hang around, and the more we do ourselves, the more sustained this impact will be. I don’t think Occupy has any magic ability to fix things that other movements don’t, but I do think that it is finally time for a sustained mass movement of people fed up with the way things have been run for the last several decades. If the 90’s were the tale of the middle class being bought off to ignore the plight of the working class, the 2000’s were the tale of the middle class sharing their fate. The 2010’s will be the decade we get our shit together, but unfortunately it will probably take most of the decade to even reverse the decline, let alone regain our prior position.
Finally, I’d like to be clear about what occupy is not. We are not the bonus army. We are not a group of people coming out to beg for a handout, asking for a specific check to be cut for us. While the Bonus Army’s demands were legitimate, they were asking for a specific policy. OccupyBaltimore and its cousin in Wall Street are not here to pan handle. We aren’t asking for the government to give us anything, what we are asking for is the Government to do its fucking job, stop subsidizing the stupid choices of massive financial institutions and other industries. Stop funneling our money into industries that waste it, whether it is giving massive tax breaks to capital gains, massive tax breaks to oil companies, or massive tax breaks to defense contractors, who are overbilling us to begin with. The government has essentially become a giant wealth sponge, sucking up everyone’s cash and depositing it into puddles around the country. Unsurprisingly these companies are the ones that are the biggest and most prolific donors to the people running our government. Worse even still, the people who staff the various congressional offices are all bought off, and even some of the regulatory agencies are guilty of overlooking the crimes of the industry the regulate due to offering jobs to the people that work there.
This whole mess adds up to the situation we have now. Young Americans have the lowest share of national wealth since we started keeping track, and Old Americans have the highest. While I’m sure some of that issue will resolve itself as the old die, the fact is that young people now are at risk of becoming a lost generation, much like the Japanese who came of age in the 1990’s. This benefits no one. By limiting the social mobility, opportunities, and the wealth of my cohort, the oldest generation is actually holding back potential innovation and world changing vision. It is no coincidence that the richest people of all time are born in clusters; the success of an individual does not and cannot occur in a vacuum. By definition we are always going to be limited by the context in which we act. Unless we fix the economy, we fix the political process, we fix the entire system, then it isn’t just hell to pay for us kids, its everyone who loses out. We’re not here asking for a check, we’re asking for opportunity, education, and liberty, all things we feel we are given in spurts at best, and at worst not at all.
So, those are my thoughts on Day 36 of Occupy Baltimore and Day 2 of a 7 Day fast.
Below is a video of our march this weekend, we have a dragon!
