An unconscious civilization

As police have been taking down Occupy sites across North America, the conversations that I have had with people have been surprising.  I had a very heated argument about the sites today at lunch with someone who thought it was time that they come down, and indicated that the Occupy movement hadn’t been effective.

I have several issues with this train of thought.

Yes, people encamped on public property periodically marching and shutting down city streets is a nuisance: that’s the point.  The point is to raise awareness and to capture the attention of the powers that be.  What is the alternative?  Doing nothing?  It is exactly that – doing nothing – that led to what has to have been one of the largest transfers of wealth in our history.

And what are we going to do about it?  We’re going to believe the “mainstream” media when it continues to parade the homeless and the mentally ill across our screen and tells us that the Occupy camps have become a Mecca for the marginalized?

Are you fucking kidding me?  Can no one think independently?  What is really happening here?  Homeless people and people with drug addictions are showing up to sites that provide free food and clothing because our society isn’t doing a good enough job of it.  It reminds me of the quote that “a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest members”.

Can people affect change en masse?  They are currently doing it in Europe and the Middle East: they are rioting and they are overthrowing governments.  I mentioned this and was met with “but we’re not in the same position as them”.  No: we’re not.  Our grandfathers and our great grandfathers fought and died so that we would have this “democracy”, this “freedom” and we’re not doing anything to protect it while lobbyists and corporatists and our very elected officials chip away at it, bit by bit so that we don’t really feel the pinch at first.

Have we forgotten why we are mad?  I have not forgotten.  I do not forget such massive transgressions that have been levied against me.  This is a Time Magazine article, from two years ago:

Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in the economy.

But the only green shoots that many non–Wall Street types have seen lately are the weeds sprouting in the parking lots of abandoned malls. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising. If you're a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where's my bailout?

Wall Street created complicated financial vehicles, bundled them up, sold them with Standard and Poor and Moody’s highest ratings and when those financial vehicles turned out to be worth less than the paper they were printed on these assholes collected hundreds of billions of money from the government and then turned around and with that money they awarded themselves obscene bonuses.  And no one went to jail.

Are you okay with this?  
I lost thousands of dollars and my fucking job because of this.

Per Wikipedia:

In 2007 the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country's total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%. Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country's wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%. Financial inequality (total net worth minus the value of one's home) was greater than inequality in total wealth, with the top 1% of the population owning 42.7%, the next 19% of Americans owning 50.3%, and the bottom 80% owning 7%. However, after the Great Recession which started in 2007, the share of total wealth owned by the top 1% of the population grew from 34.6% to 37.1%, and that owned by the top 20% of Americans grew from 85% to 87.7%. The Great Recession also caused a drop of 36.1% in median household wealth but a drop of only 11.1% for the top 1%, further widening the gap between the 1% and the 99%.  During the economic expansion between 2002 and 2007, the income of the top 1% grew 10 times faster than the income of the bottom 90%. In this period 66% of total income gains went to the 1%, who in 2007 had a larger share of total income than at any time since 1928.

Are you okay with that?

The middle class is disappearing.

We have just been severely robbed and people are saying “good riddance” to the few of us that dared speak up.  And, in this glorious bastion of democracy: what changes have been wrought?  Are our governments listening?  Are they meeting with these people that want to change an unfair and fundamentally broken system?

They are nowhere to be found.

Occupy spoke and it was overwhelmingly ignored.

I’ll ask again: are you okay with this?