(A year ago, on the eve of the First Birthday of #Occupy Wall Street!, I fiddled and futzed with my old Dell Laptop; hooked up an $8 microphone; dusted off the guitar, harmonica and vocal chords and created a music video of a revised version of "The Flame of Liberty Park" as a birthday present to the courageous souls who put their hearts on the line at Zuccotti Park! It seems it's that time again! Happy Birthday #OWS! And now you are two!)
I wrote the first version of "The Flame of Liberty Park" the night that Mayor Bloomberg first drew a line in the sand, threatening to clear Zuccotti Park at daybreak. If you remember, MoveOn.org had then rapidly collected and delivered 250, 000 signatures to City Hall demanding that the Mayor back off and thousands of NYC union members had showed up to bolster the Occupiers. It was a tense time. (I was tuned that night from MA via Livestream) As dawn approached the word came in. Mayor Bloomberg had backed off. A whoop went up! Folks were ecstatic!
Well, as we all know, time rolled on and a couple of months later, under the cover of darkness, the mayor's militarized minions swept the park. Yet, as many of us know, the Occupy Spirit rolls on, alive and well, in many forms--in NYC (see Occupy Sandy) and throughout the world.
Although the Top Dogs of Canine Capitalism continue to beat the drums of war, violence, avarice, and greed, a whole bunch of us continue to march to the beat of a different drummer. In our heart of hearts we know a better world is possible. It's only a matter of time.
(CONTINUED)
Occupy Wallstreet and the Terrible Two's?
More thoughts on #OWS!
Time, of course, is decidedly odd. Maybe it just seems to move at a lightning clip these days because I'm 67 years old, but it seems unbelievable that the brilliant spark of Human Spirit that erupted in Zuccotti Park as Occupy Wall Street happened two years ago already! At times, it still seems like just the other day. Then again, at other times, it merges into the memories of the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of my youth. (Of course, in the realm of the Spirit it's all timeless, no?)
The time I did spend in October of 2011at Liberty Park, the Heart of the #Occupy Movement, affirmed to me that the core inspiration of #OWS! was essentially Spiritual. It emerged from from the same Source as the Energy that motivated Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless millions of other human beings throughout time. As best I sense it, that Energy flows from a deep compassion for the plight we find ourselves in as human beings--and a clear perception of a world that we humanoids are capable of creating if we only set aside the burdens of self-centered fear, greed, and ignorance--and roll up our sleeves. Turning toward one another rather than turning against one another, we are capable of literally creating heaven on earth. When we work together in the Spirit of Peace and Love we are capable of nothing short of the Miraculous. The hippies were right.
Wall Street, symbolically and realistically, embodies the exact opposite worldview. As the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman Free Market Privateers came to ascendancy in the past thirty years and used their wealth and influence to highjack greater and greater control of the mass media--and then the government itself--many of us were hoodwinked.
The "real" world, they would have us believe, is a perpetual battleground of competition ranging from trying to score an A on the next test to bombing the hell out of other human beings. Life, these Canine Capitalists proclaim, is essentially a bitch. It's just a dog eat dog scramble for survival.
Their message, drummed into us since we were glued to the boob tube in infancy, is quite clear: Just get with the program, Dog! Go find yourself a honey and buy your own happiness as best you can. If you work hard--and party hard--you've made it! Heck, if you're fortunate enough, you'll hit the lotto--either through accident of birth or powerball--you get to cruise along as a Top Dog. If not? Then just deal with it. You're powerless to change things.
Well, as Uncle Abe Lincoln once said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
#Occupy Wall Street!, like other Movements of the Human Spirit past, present, and future, rejects the Canine Capitalist version of reality. Although the current Top Dogs and their Police Dogs swept the #Occupy Encampments away, two years down the road there are still millions and millions of us--worldwide--that haven't lost sight of the true bottom line. In our heart of hearts we know what the Real Deal is: We are all in this together. In fact, as Einstein (and Mystics throughout time) discovered: WE ARE ALL THIS--TOGETHER! There is a whole lot of power available to us.
So, what do we Do about it?
Rather than continue to Ramble On here, I want to refer you to an article by Occupy Everywhere's Jerry Ashton: "Occupy: The Terrible Two's Coming Up?" His LinkedIn Group is one of the sites that I surf through to stay in Touch. They're a couple of folks shy of having 1000 members and maybe you'd like to see them get 1000 candles on their birthday cake as we light these two for #OWS!
Also, for a good overview of what #OWS! continues to do beyond the purview of the mass media representation of it's "death", check out an excellent article by Allison Kilkenny at The Nation.com today.
Happy Birthday #2 Occupy Wall Street!
Taken on Day 12 of #Occupy Wall Street!
this photograph certainly was
A Sign of the Times!
1 comment:
Exceedingly well said, Lefty. Truly. Keep on keepin' on, Kid.
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