My wife tells me that a number of years ago, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich took a trip across the country. He visited lots of small towns, stopping in diners and other places where locals hang out and holding casual conversations with anyone he happened to meet.
Based on the interviews I've seen with him on TV, Reich would certainly fall on the liberal side of the political spectrum, and he obviously thinks of himself that way. In fact, that was the premise of his trip -- to see how the other half lives, who they are and what they think.
Reich was apparently quite surprised to find that the average Joes he bumped into weren't nearly as ideological as he thought, their positions not as polarizing as he expected. They shared many of his own concerns, and he and they weren't diametrically opposed in terms of solutions. Which brings me to the title of this diary and the Occupy movement.
I was heartened to read an excerpt from this article on Daily Kos yesterday. If you missed it, the gist was that some people from Occupy Memphis were invited to talk with a local Memphis Tea Party group. The talk was supposed to last 1/2 hour -- but it lasted for two hours. And, while peace on Earth wasn't declared, there was some amount of goodwill toward men, and women as well. One Tea Party member even said he could see that Occupy and the Tea Party have "the same goals."
So, I thought just maybe, when you get past the birtherism and the fear of brown people, there could be some commonality between the two movements. Just maybe.
And then last night I saw this opinion piece in the Washington Post. Toward the end of that very thoughtful and well-written essay, the Occupy movement authors say that "Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement... And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them ... perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party."
There's not way to know if that kind of a political step can happen, or if that would even be a good thing. But it seems at the very least that there could be an opportunity, and a desire, in this country to get past what the corporate media has been feeding us for decades -- us vs. them, left vs. right, red vs. blue. It's in the clear interest of the media and the corporations that own them to divide us, to perpetuate the belief that we are different, that it's impossible to find common ground. That's how they maintain control, and its been working very, very well for a long time.
But what if we could get past the surface differences? What if we could get down to what really matters, real issues like income inequality and the lack of real economic opportunity? What if we could join together in an effective way with those on "the other side"? Then we could have a genuine chance to become the 99% we claim to be.
So, why not hold more meetings like the one in Memphis? Why not reach out across the chasm and invite the Tea Party to talk? Why not hold conversations in every Occupy city and town in the country? You want to see the oligarchs quake in their boots? Let's try finding common cause across the spectrum and see what happens.