Congratulations, Mayors Bloomberg and Quan, city powers of Chapel Hill and Portland. You panicked in the face of change. And doing so, you rent holes in the veil of ‘respectability’ and ‘order’ which is ever how the powerful exert the status quo. (For if the status quo ante did not benefit the powerful, they would not be powerful, no?)
Most of all, congratulations for rekindling a fire of righteous anger in the Occupiers—a fire the chill of coming winter had threatened to cool.
So now that you have done all that, let’s see if you can complete the trifecta. Let’s see how shamelessly and transparently you can show yourselves in attempting to lure the Occupiers back into the system they’ve so profoundly rejected.
Of course, there could be trouble with that. Because as you have demonstrated, that system is morally inadequate to foster (or even tolerate) the goals it proclaims to foster. You know, those old chestnuts. Freedom. Self-determination. Charity. Mercy. Justice.
So it could pose a problem, getting them to come back into the fold. I mean, the very foundations of the system—its economic, military, political, legal, bureaucratic institutions—why, you’ve just shown them to be utterly unjust.
Still, you mayors, you 1%ers, you fellow travelers. You can always hope the Occupiers will voluntarily co-opt themselves. Again. That they will back up, throw their cluetrain into reverse, and revert to believing the system that has screwed them and theirs for half a century can be reformed. Maybe you can convince them that if just the right people get in in just the right way (unlike all those pretentious sixties and seventies and eighties, etc., assholes) the system will, gradually, incrementally,abandon the corruption it has practiced and grown so expertly powerful at creating.
Maybe once you've driven that sliver of ice into their hearts, you can make them corrupt, too, and restore the system that has benefited you so well.
You've done it before. Could be you can pull it off again.
But.
These Occupiers are stubborn. They may not buy into the desirability of perpetuating the bankers’ rules, even if you agree to get rid of some of the bankers. (They may remember what Gandhi said: why keep the tiger’s nature but believe you could leave out the tiger?)
They may not fall for it.
They may refuse to submit to assumptions of the “way things are.” After all, they’ve already proved a lot of them untrue, no matter how forcefully you keep pushing them.
You know: Money doesn’t always corrupt. And even when it does, eventually we’ll get rid of money’s corrupting influence, by raising enough money to place better people in its corrupting path.
These clowns may just remember how thoroughly “the way things are” can blind us to how things are.
They may also remember more than a little bit about Gandhi. How he said,
Independence begins at the bottom... not a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But…an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual. Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.
They may just find some way to achieve the twin objectives of empowering the people and 'disempowering' the corporate state.
They’ve already shown the first.
But if you don’t want them to reach the second (which would be the end for your wonderful rule), you better get busy. Get them back in the system. Get them to spend their energies (and their money, hee, hee!) in “electing better candidates” to serve in a system that you have (this very week) proved beyond dispute is both corrupt and corrupting.
But do it soon. Or they may figure out that other way: “Power resides in the people, they can use it at any time.”
A society must be built in which every village has to be self sustained and capable of managing its own affairs... It will be trained and prepared to perish in the attempt to defend itself against any onslaught from without... This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be a free and voluntary play of mutual forces... In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles.
For, even though you may say they are dreamers, they’re not the only ones.