Occupy Your Conscience: A Rumpus Exaltation

[abelenkpe]

Occupy Your Conscience: A Rumpus Exaltation

http://therumpus.net/2011/10/occupy-your-conscience-a-rumpus-exaltation/

When I was four or five years old, my mom and dad called me and my brothers into the living room. I can’t remember what they said exactly, but the gist was that dad might be going to jail for a few days. He was going to protest the war by joining hands with other people at the gates to a nearby air force base.

I thought the situation strange. Why would the police send you to jail for holding hands?

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Activists weren’t some fringe element back then. They had defeated the naked bigotry of the Jim Crow south. They had waged a war on poverty. Now they wanted to end a senseless war. People believed that taking to the streets could change the moral condition of the country. There weren’t nearly as many screens in our lives; we hadn’t begun pouring so much of ourselves into them. Idealism wasn’t an object of ridicule. It was a legitimate, even laudable, belief system.

(snip)The Occupy Wall Street movement is an effort to identify the perpetrators. It takes direct aim at the financial speculators and corporations who caused the economic implosion of 2008, the corrosive influence of money in our political system, and the obscene economic inequality this influence has wrought.

It consists of citizens – mostly progressives, but also independents and conservatives – who decided spontaneously to take to the streets. They were not exhorted by for-profit demagogues, or chauffeured to the site in luxury buses airbrushed with focus-grouped slogans.

(more at link)

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Great article! check it out and enjoy....