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Edited on Thu Oct-06-11 08:30 AM by Pacifist Patriot
I don’t for one moment honestly believe anyone who is paying attention can fail to grasp the message in the Occupy Wall Street movement. There may be an absence of identifiable leadership in terms of a charismatic speaker addressing a million people massed at the steps of the Lincoln memorial, but that can’t be confused with the lack of a coherent message. The problem lies with being unable to fully express that message on a bumper sticker, in a ten second sound bite or within the average attention span of the people who really need to hear it. There is no slogan and quite frankly, I don’t think there should be. It’s bigger than that.
I’ll try to articulate what I believe to be the primary goal in the broadest terms possible, but even that will leave certain individuals scratching their heads. Either because they don’t get it or they want a detailed plan.
The 99% want an economy and power structure that affirms human dignity, not one that denies and destroys it.
As a community minister, most of my ministry is done outside the four walls of a place of worship. My job is to meet people where they are. Consequently, I serve religious people of many faiths, the “spiritual, but not religious” and yes, even the non-religious. I am both a non-denominational minister and a no-denominational minister. I am called upon to provide a non-anxious presence at a time when anxiety is all someone knows. As you can imagine, I’m a very busy woman these days.
I have watched three people die of cancer this year, one woman lasting less than 160 days from diagnosis to death. She and her husband own a small business and a modest home. Had she lasted much longer, both the home and the business would have been lost to financial ruin. Imagine grief compounded with relief the financial pressure of terminal illness didn’t result in homelessness and five people losing their jobs. The other two families were not as “lucky.”
The 99% want to know they are not one catastrophic illness away from losing everything they’ve worked for and the hope they have for their future.
Earlier this summer I had to invoke mandatory reporting for the first time. I had been ministering to a family in which the father had been jobless for almost three years. I’ve seen his depression grow exponentially worse despite the love and support of an extended family network. He began expressing the feeling his family would be better off dead than living like this. I felt real fear a family annihilator might be sitting before me. There was no psychiatric help available to him after the initial admission and assessment. At least nothing a family in this situation can afford.
The 99% want to know the odds of being in this situation themselves are astronomically low, but if it is, they can get help.
Last spring I sat up with a young girl for hours the night before her high school graduation. She hadn’t eaten in several days and couldn’t stop crying. She was terrified of the “real world.” She had everything in order to begin college in the fall….including student loans. She knew her parents were also taking out a home equity line of credit to help with her tuition and living expenses. She also knew her brother who would be graduating from college in December owed over $30,000 in student loans already and was beginning to panic over getting a job in order to pay them back because his friends who’d graduated that spring were all jobless save one.
The 99% want their children to go off to college with a sense of excitement and optimism, not trepidation and despair.
About this time last year, a couple who had booked me to officiate their wedding ceremony called a few weeks before to ask about scaling it down. Way down. They had been living with his mom whom they just learned was being foreclosed on. She had hidden her financial problems from them because she did not want to ruin their big day. The mother had purchased the house at the height of the market when she had a job that would easily cover the mortgage. Since purchasing the house, her take home pay has been reduced more than 30% because of both pay cuts and increases in employee contributions to benefits. All three would be homeless in a matter of months. Could they just come over to my house and have a private elopement? That huge wedding they had to scale back had consisted of a BBQ for 30 at a municipal park.
The 99% want a better life for their children than they had, not a harder one.
I visit a young man in the county jail who has been sitting there for over a year waiting for his case, a non-violent offense, to come to trial. One of the charges has been dropped, the other was supposed to have been tried last January, but keeps getting delayed. He’s seen his public defender twice. He is over a thousand dollars in debt to the county because they charge you for a portion of the expense of your incarceration. He is estranged from his family and as an inmate he’s obviously unemployed. Exactly how is he to pay this debt?
The 99% want a pragmatic justice system and to never become victim of an industrial prison complex.
I drive shut-ins to the polls on election days. Each election cycle I’ve been getting fewer and fewer requests. I called a few right before the mid-terms last year only to hear repeatedly, “why bother, my vote is not going to be counted properly anyway.”
The 99% want an election system where they don’t just feel their vote counts, they know it does.
I have ministered to returning vets who have been unimaginably damaged, physically, emotionally and psychologically by their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have ministered to victims of bullying in inadequately staffed nursing homes. I have ministered to government employees laid off because of budget cuts in what most of us would consider essential services. I have ministered to children who will never experience a stable home because our social services are a strange and tangled network of government and NGOs struggling to cooperate with one another, but often constrained by regulations and mandates.
The 99% want to know they are valued for who they are and what they do whether its collecting your garbage, teaching your kids or performing surgery on your spouse.
This is about human dignity and power. When 1% control the wealth, and consequently the power, is it any wonder human dignity is suppressed? No one denies the profit motive is a valid incentive. Businesses do need to make a profit to remain in business. It’s the disparity folks. When a CEO makes over 350 times what his average employee earns, and yes, it is most likely to be a he, that’s wrong. When a corporation makes record profits without paying taxes on their earnings, that’s wrong. When banks engage in predatory lending practices, charge exorbitant fees and accept bailout money without passing along the financial relief to their customers, that’s wrong. When funding war and destruction goes without question while social programs are dismantled, that’s wrong.
This isn’t just an economic and political issue, it’s a moral and ethical one.
Why? Because of the families grieving for their sick and dying loved ones, the people concerned about providing for their families, the students deserving the hope that should come naturally in youth, the faceless and nameless who are callously brushed off as “the dregs” of society.
Because the 99% are human beings, and with that comes the inherent worth and dignity to love and be loved—to speak and to be heard—to share in the task of raising up themselves and their neighbors, not being used to prop up the 1%.
Human Dignity
Should it really be this hard for a democratic society to achieve?
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