This week I've been enjoying the stream of paranoid emails and Facebook messages that have started to reach me, wherein people are freaked out about how there is actually a populist uprising going on the United States. I concede that we have good reason to believe that the power brokers will be nervous that someone is actually noticing that the average Goldman Sachs employee makes $292,000 per year. This is the same company that placed bets that an oil rig would blow up in the Gulf of Mexico. Remember that? Fabulous Fabrice and his infamous, "Suck it up, fishies and birdies"?
The big boys have had the luxury of thirty years to take advantage of a public that has, until now, yet to call them to task. Most recent polls I've heard of give the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the support of at least 57% of the American public, with many more who don't agree with them saying they have the right to protest. Some neighbors of Zuccotti Park are, understandably, annoyed at the drumming and 24-hour activity in a neighborhood that after 6 pm previously resembled a cemetery. I heard this week that the drummers were asked to go elsewhere, in order to address this problem.
Meanwhile, most other New Yorkers are into the protests, which have sprung up literally from coast to coast and many places beyond. This sounds like the United States of my wildest fantasies. More to the point, it sounds like the Uranus-Pluto cycle heating up, so reliably you could set your atomic clock to it. Though neither the protesters nor the protestees are likely to know this, this movement is going to have traction because it's synced with an astrological cycle that is specifically about revolution and social progress on real issues.
One concern I've heard is how the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD are trying to infiltrate the movement. (This is an old story -- cops have tried to infiltrate activist movements since they both existed.) The main fear going around is that they will try to provoke the activists into coming off like the scruffy mob that Fox News is making them out to be. One person writing to me is worried that Anonymous, the hacker collective, is really a CIA front operation. We have a commenter on the Planet Waves blog who is tweaked by the Guy Fawkes masks that people wear to the protests. She thinks those are the actual members of the Anonymous collective, who you cannot trust because they're wearing masks. (If you get on their bad side, a mask is the last thing you'll have to worry about.)
One astrologer in New York City tried to send me an encrypted file that had all the goods, but after a few tries the encrypted email would not go through. I encouraged her to just email it the old-fashioned way. After several tries, the PDF arrived last night via the ultra-secret, immune-from-domestic-surveillance Hushmail. I clicked on it with the eager anticipation of a document junkie.
Scanning over its chaotic pages, I read about the links between the Wall Street sit-in to the Sandinistas, Barack Obama, MoveOn!, the Independent Media Institute, Adbusters magazine, ACORN, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, Public Citizen, the Rainforest Action Network, Refuse & Resist!, the Ruckus Society, the Service Employees International Union, San Francisco Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sierra Club and the Soros Foundation Community Fellows.
Wait -- the Sandinistas? Really? Those cool people down in Nicaragua who were into building farm cooperatives, community hospitals and schools? Who supported mass literacy and gender equality? The ones Ronald Reagan hated so much he nearly lost his presidency trying to destroy them? They still exist? Where can I send a check?
And the Ruckus Society? No wonder this is all causing such a ruckus.
And what about George Soros? Isn't he one of them? Why would he be going against them when he's really one of them? There has to be something weird going on. He must be a double agent, or maybe a triple agent. He's going to infiltrate the movement by having one of his front organizations send a shipment of air mattresses and a case of chai.
The involvement of Adbusters I learned about after someone posted a comment to the website of the Daily Freeman here in Kingston, really nervous and concerned, after there was a little protest march in front of the courthouse, with the participants' average age looking like about 60. The commenter said that Occupy Wall Street was started by a "Canadian ad agency," insinuating foreign infiltration.
Occupying The Other Wall Street -- protesters in Kingston, New York gathered outside the county courthouse on our Wall Street last week, staging their own demonstration. Nobody slept over, and nobody got arrested.
I asked around and put this comment together with the splashy, snarky anti-consumerist magazine that your local Barnes & Noble gets all of five copies of each month -- Adbusters. The magazine critiques the 'mental environment'. Count on them for articles about how it's wrong to be forced to watch 10 advertisements sitting in a movie theater. They're the ones who invented Buy Nothing Day (commemorated each year the Friday after Thanksgiving).
Adbusters' editor Kalle Lasn, a refugee from the advertising industry, was the one who first put out the concept of occupying Wall Street in a July email to his reader list. With a little help from the deputy inspector of the NYPD who pepper sprayed some women just because he felt like it, #Occupy is the coolest thing in the world. Or rather it is unless you're freaked out that if anyone questions the legitimacy of the corporate-government-national security state, or dares to blaspheme the religion of the Free Market, or questions that some dude sitting in a cubicle ripping off the economy should make $292,000 a year -- then clearly whole system we love and benefit from and pay handsomely for the privilege of using debit cards is going to come crashing down on our heads.
Today, someone posted an undated picture of a riot to my Facebook page and said in that frantic tone that can only be conveyed in sentence fragments, "look at this 'peaceful resistance'!...somebody will say it's nothing to do with wall street occupation...let me tell you -- they (on the street) declare opposite!..it's just ..not everybody is ready and has right consciousness for a change..and there is someone leading them in a trap." Um, not everyone has the right consciousness? Therefore call the whole thing off and go back to yoga class?
The posh New York City astrologer who smuggled me the top-secret file, for her part, is absolutely certain that this is all a setup for martial law. I asked her about her spiritual training on the issue of 'fear' and she replied, "While spirituality is very important, unfortunately there are some not-so-nice people on this planet with us."
No, really?
I replied, "To say that something is a setup for martial law is, at best, presumptuous. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to me there are many other possibilities." Since she's an astrologer, I added: "The plane of reality to which you're attached or typically reside will influence your perception of the flow of events and the validity of information. Indicators [of your mindset] are things like the polarization level of your experience, your love/fear quotient, and what you perceive as real."
People who are paranoid about Occupy Wall Street might have one of a few things going on, psychologically speaking. First, they may have authority issues, which result in a blowback of guilt when they or anyone they see challenges authority. (This connects to unresolved relationships with their parents, which by the way usually involve money issues.) Or, they are getting off on the self-importance of warning people about a big threat that nobody else is informed enough to see. Trying to send the file by encrypted mail comes with the message, "I'm so important, they're spying on me." And many people feel too cool to support the protest, like economic justice was a good thing until it became trendy. So naturally, all of a sudden it's a CIA plot. Personally, I take the suggestion of David Byrne, from the old Taking Heads song: Don't worry about the government.
I would say that the real problem the Occupy Wall Street movement has is great expectations. We are a country so starved for leadership and moral guidance that many people actually expect this uprising to solve the nation's problems. One question going around is, "How are they going to influence Washington?" As if to say -- finally we have something that actually might do so.
This is an excerpt from the weekly subscriber article written and produced by Eric Francis for Planet Waves.