Jamie Johnson who is an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, used his family positions to make a documentary about the very percent we are all struggling to continue to bring back into economic balance with the rest of us. Here is why he did it.
YouTube has it in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 parts. (via)
He also made Born Rich.
He currently writes a blog for Vanity Fair.
Last night in Long Beach, Ca., a bunch of people who have big hearts Occupied Lincoln Park which is the oldest park in the city. I was there, and I spoke to a young woman who told us passionately that if we had our tents up at 10:00pm the police would slash them and we would be manhandled and thrown in jail. That is what the city police do to Long Beach's homeless population and that is the part of my city's population she belongs to.* She looked me in the eyes as she said, "you guys still have rights. We don't have rights."
Everyone writes about the sweeping change that the 99 percent are hoping to usher in. So many people are excited, full of hope for the first time in a generation. We all hope we can change things.
I want to say clearly that we are fighting something that we can't even comprehend. We are fighting more money than we can imagine. We are fighting the system that insulates the top 1 percent from the 99 percent. We are fighting people who are afraid of us.
Let's talk about being afraid. It's not a rational experience. Lots of us are afraid of spiders. Please take a moment and do some inner reflection and tell yourself what you are tempted to do when you are afraid. My first response is to eradicate whatever is scaring me. That's not the action I usually take, but the urge is there. I think of the thing that is scaring me as a threat. I want to remove the threat.
I come from working class people, and those people tried to jump classes. I was socialized by my early education to identify with the middle class. I have spent my adult life with my soon to be ex husband striving to amass enough money to feel safe from the experience of power abuse that I saw in that young woman's eyes last night. I know that the police are part of us. I know that they have families they worry about and mortgages they are trying to afford. I recognize their humanity. But who recognizes the humanity of the homeless people?
By myself I don't have enough power or money to help the people on the streets. That is the truth and it is a depressing thought that I don't often allow myself to acknowledge. Sometimes I give people who don't have a home money and sometimes I don't. I buy them gloves and food. I feel helpless to change their terrible experiences. I sat in my car during the debate this country had on healthcare last year and I listened to my president say that we couldn't afford to give everyone in this country access to health care because not everyone plays by the rules. Some people just aren't going to join in. That's not a direct quote. But I remember sitting in my car and hearing him say that. I had pulled over because I wanted to hear what he was going to say, and I felt excited that we finally had someone in the White House who cared about all of the citizens of this country. I felt like I had been hit in the stomach and I turned off the radio.
I know lots of people who are afraid of homeless people and afraid of being homeless too. They think that homeless people made bad choices that landed them in the most despised class in this country. Those videos up there on top of this diary say otherwise. Whether many of us acknowledge this or not, we have interior work to do. We need to remember that it isn't someone's choice to be mentally ill, or economically disadvantaged, or alienated from a system that is unjust at it's core. I hope people will think about that as they start to recognize this movement.
Many of the people I have met in Occupy Long Beach are well educated people. But we are out of our element in putting together our city's embodiment of Occupy Everything. This shit is HARD, y'all. It's easy to look at what is wrong and bitch about it. Learning how to make our voices heard is harder than that. We are making mistakes. That is the most powerful way to learn.
Please. Please join us.
*I know this is grammatically incorrect. I don't care.