I've been watching the #ows protests through Twitter, Kos, and other venues with a mix of horror and delight. Horror at the behavior of the cops, at the blatant civil rights violations, at the complete cluelessness and arrogance of the various 1%ers who are trying to hold on to their little financial fiefdoms... and delight at the renewed and vital spirit of America and of revolution, which I haven't seen in all my 40 years until the elections of 2008, as protesters continue to persevere and defy authority and money and power and chant "The whole world is watching!" at the oppressing class.
I believe I'm watching the second American Revolution happening right before my eyes... and I wish my father had lived to see it too.
Below the fold, an attempt to explain what I think is actually going on here. In two words: growing pains.
The United States, as a nation, is pretty damn young compared to most other Westernized, industrialized, modern nations in the world. If you count from the day we decided we were a nation and signed a certain Declaration stating so, we're about 235 years old. If you count from the year that the entire contiguous US was covered, we're only about 99 years old (Arizona was the last state in the contiguous US to be admitted to the Union in 1912). Want to count from the day we became a 50-state nation, the form we are in now? Well, Hawaii joined us in 1959, a piddly 52 years ago.
So, compared to England (a nation at least since 927) at about 1100 years old, or Japan (a nation since about 784) at about 1300 years old, we're babies even if you're really generous and count our age from the day in 1776 when the Declaration was signed and sent off to old King George. If you compare the lifespan of those two nations to ours, the way you might compare "cat years" to "human years" to get an idea of feline lifespan and development, and if we assume - for the sake of argument - that England is, oh, 62 or so and Japan is 75 in "human years," we're about 13 or 14 years old by comparison, with comparatively less maturity and experience. And even those adult nations are facing anger and occupation by people who have been exploited by our policies of grabbing everything in the world sandbox for ourselves.
In other words, America has been a pre-teen for a while and is now entering its adolescence as a nation. And adolescence is where we finally start to learn from our mistakes, instead of just repeating them over and over and over. Adolescence is when we have to learn the hard truths of real life, take responsibility for our own actions, learn that we're going to be held accountable, and learn to get along with others without starting fights every five minutes - in short, it's when we learn to be adults. And I hope we're learning now.
I hope we're learning that we have to share equally, or we all lose eventually. The fact that many of the 1%ers are posting to a Tumblr blog to support us tells me that this lesson is, in fact, being learned.
I hope we're learning that we can't bully those who are less powerful than us, or they will eventually rise up en masse and whip our asses. If the 1%ers who aren't willing to learn that we have to share equally haven't seen that by now with the mass protests all across this nation and the world, they will never learn - but many people who have been afraid to stand up are taking heart from their fellow victims and saying "You know what, they have a point." This tells me that some of us, maybe enough of us, are learning this lesson too.
I hope we're learning compassion. Kindness. Patience. Selflessness. The beginnings of adulthood, perhaps. Knowing that the General Assemblies all over the nation and the world have as two of their main tenets that there be NO VIOLENCE and NO BIGOTRY tells me that compassion and kindness are there in abundance, at least at these important flashpoints, and the willingness of so many to occupy and continue to occupy even in the face of threat of arrest tells me that patience and selflessness are also being served up in full measure, even to those whose actions show they don't deserve it. We've moved beyond deserving, at this point.
I hope we're learning responsibility. All of us. I hope we're learning that being tricked into living beyond our means because we had no other way to live is not a trick we will fall for again, and that we will hold those who are in fact responsible for it accountable.
Finally, I hope we're learning the power that the stories we tell ourselves and each other have, and how to put that power to positive use. We must never let this happen again. Don't just let it be "one for the history books." Be living history for your families, your children, their children. Tell this story, and tell them to tell this story, over and over, so that it can never happen again. The Greatest Generation told the Boomers, but the Boomers didn't communicate it so well to the next generations because it was too hard to deal with it, and then we got this fiasco. Never let our children or their descendants forget, again. Ever. Tell it so that it can never happen again.
I said on Twitter today that revolutions are how nations grow up. And if you're a patriot, you'll support this revolution, because we've been a selfish adolescent long enough already.
Time to grow up, America. The adults of the world are waiting for you.