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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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?The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.?
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Perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, victims: we can be clear about three of these categories. The bystander, however, is the fulcrum.
If there are enough notable exceptions, then protest reaches a critical mass. We don?t usually think of history as being shaped by silence, but, as English philosopher Edmund Burke said,
?The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.?
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If you are not hearing the message of the OWS protesters, perhaps you are not listening...
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Dear Occupiers of Wall Street: A Love Letter
I?m feeling such gratitude/hero-worship for the OWS protesters. I know how tired and hungry and foolish it feels to stand in public, standing on nothing but your principles. I know how energizing and wonderful and empowering it can feel to meet so many like-minded folks. It?s group therapy of the best kind to to look someone in the eye and hear, ?This happened to me, too.? There?s power in that.
I know that many times demands of a protest are not met. During my first ever protest at 17 years old, the Thing That We Were Marching Against happened while we wept on the sidewalk. But even if OWS does nothing else, it has already done so much.
It has awakened the knowledge in our bones that we don?t have to suffer in silence, we can have a voice. It has hopefully held up a much-needed mirror to the ones who?ve been crying ?class warfare? over being in the higher tax bracket.
Of course not all of the 10% or even the 1% fall into this argument. (I do wish that I could join them, but I was already out of work for most of 2009, so I know all too well how hard it will be to get another job if I lose this one.)
First of all, shame on all those who have cast dispersions on the protests. Really! Seriously! It must be quite a place of luxury to sit ?on high? while people (who have lost their retirement savings, their jobs, or God forbid, the roof over their heads) demonstrate their righteous outrage at those who profited OBSCENELY from sinking our investments.
What certain execs on Wall Street have done to Americans is nothing short of disgusting. They?ve been doing it for years and it?s a wonder the people?s revolution has taken this long. The hard work and savings that we saw as a duty to future generations and an obligation to our families, they saw as a game.
We entered into a trust agreement with Wall Street. Foolish? You bet. We believed they were on our side; that the design of the markets dictated that growth for them would mean growth for us. They violated that agreement for many years.
They have made gross profits by keeping our wages low, and then shared the profits with us, and we were quiet. They made billions by gouging our food, fuel, and home prices and then gave us a slice of the pie to shut us up. They made record-breaking, unheard-of sums of money by trashing our shared oceans and our shared air, and our health has suffered. But our 401Ks were seeing 12% gains and we mistook that money for Our Fair Share. But now things have changed.
Light is the best disinfectant, and some important truths have been brought to light. They swindled hard-working folks by selling them toxic assets and then asked those same folks to loan them the dough to cover the losses. And now the critics expect these protesters to thank them for helpfully pointing out that their complaints don?t fit handily on a bumper sticker? I. Don?t. Think. So.
90% of the bank bailout money was repaid. We lost some billions of dollars on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but ultimately we absorbed the Wall Street losses in a much more personal way.
We lost our savings and our job security. We have a lower standard of living than our parents did thanks to the greed of a few. I have no right to suggest demands on behalf of the gutsy folks who have actually worn out shoe leather exercising their First Amendment rights. Bravo to them.
And I know that the ideologies represented by the protesters run the gamut from Communist to Tea Party and everything between? But I think I have an idea of a starting place for how Wall Street could make it up to us. They can start by listening. They can start by offering some demonstration of remorse, such as turning in the members of their tribe, the ones who cheated and robbed us, to face legal justice. (despite the impracticality of pursuing and trying criminals that could number in the hundreds?)
They could start by offering to pay for the American Jobs Bill. They can start by waking up to the reality that they have helped to create and offer solutions.
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Peace and Love,
ADG |