I may have addressed already to an Occupy Forum on-line (this 74-year-old admits confusion) but there were some confusions, and I enter it here, corrected:
I don’t know how effective a strike would be, especially happening so quickly and therefore perhaps not involving enough people, but the Occupy movement is for me The Voice, our Voice, heard nowhere else at all, addressing and speaking about all those things that horrify us all yet are never truly spoken of in the media or addressed by politicians. Everywhere else is a part of a lie.
What is happening represents the only real speech we have, whether the occupy movement, or strikes, or whatever will cause that “voice” to be heard. A strike, if effective, would show that the whole society, not just the occupiers, wants to speak about the true grievances, crimes, and also the possible changes. None of this will find expression anywhere but at occupy sites. How long can we accept that our true voice can only exist in certain pen-like places where the truth speakers and the truly free are confined and threatened. Actually only in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now do we have that kind of honesty and dogged insistence on the facts and the whole truth.
With a strike, the horizontal self-government, and the insistence on self-determination, would not be confined, but would be shown to be spreading out from those locales, and becoming real for all citizens. Is it too soon for that to happen? If not, then when? We need to begin to plan for it. Surely, with a meaningful, somewhat successful strike, the whole society would have a chance to say they are not willing to go on tolerating a money-drenched, corrupt system, and show that there is life in the people still, enough life left in them to reject the destructive notion that the powerful promote of the U.S. as an empire that controls the globe, wreaking havoc and destroying human rights at home and abroad. Are we ready for a grand vision that is an alternative to sick values that sicken all. Should we believe that the match of Occupy can set a whole society on fire (I am being metaphorical, of course, “fire” being fervor in the name of justice, compassion, truth — not just as ideas, but demonstrated as having become real). I am willing to follow the judgement of those currently hoping to organize a strike — and they do seem to have unions on their side who are the very power of the machine, and who have been working and waiting longer than any one — since at least the late 1880s when the word Plutocrat became the byword that it has become again, as the real sickness has continued all this time. Any reason not to give idealism a try? How much longer do we wait, another century or two, for something other than the Pentagon, the murderous CIA, or the political-media bullshitters who occupy that “beltway” that extends from NYC to DC, both media and politicians in one club that rubber-stamps the aims of the 1%, while pretending objectivity. Are we ready for something different from that? I don’t know. I hope so. In the end, the idea that a strike hurts those who are striking will not make sense to any who feel they are too desperate for a chance to truly live to worry that it takes some inconvenience or pain to remove the obstacles to the life they feel desperately that they must achieve. I have thought that Oakland is a very progressive city that would understand those political facts, but I may not be right about that. Should we decide on a date when we stop waiting for the good and healthy society, or isn’t that kind of waiting the essence of a society that is not good and healthy? I don’t know.
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