Post-Occupyed

Shortly after midnight Tuesday, New York City police moved in to clear Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Some 142 people were arrested inside the park and another 50 outside. At this moment, the park is surrounded by barricades to keep people out while legal wrangling goes on.

If you’ve followed the stories, the Occupy protests were either (a) people rebelling against the people who run things, ostensibly for their own benefit, or (b) a hotbed of labor union activism complete with rape, sexual assaults, tuberculosis and shootings. In this case, the truth doesn’t lie somewhere in the middle; instead, it lies all over the place, including at the extremes.

The Occupy protestors have been helped by a sympathetic news media, who gave the protest ongoing, prominent and generally favorable coverage. I am simply stating a fact when I say that the news media is philosophically closer to the Occupy protestors than to the Tea Party protestors.

A few commentators early on tried to compare the two movements as comparable, but it was soon clear that wasn’t the case at all. While they are both protest movements, they have different means, goals and objectives.

President Obama came out fairly early and appeared to endorse the protests, and then he disappeared. No one is quite sure why he did that.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was fully prepared to be on the critical side of the Occupy protests, until I read what two young Christians had to say about it. Their writings gave me pause, and I stepped back and took a harder look, at both the protests and my own reactions. Good thing, too, because I was going to do my usual conservative knee-jerk response. What I learned told me more about myself than it did about the protests.

Movements often get co-opted, and Occupy is no exception. The unions, or some of them, moved in with resources. Anarchists showed up, although an organization of anarchists should be a contradiction in terms. Everyone with a cause showed up – animal rights, stop the war, organic food, you name it. It became confusing to understand what this was all about except perhaps one big protest party.

But early on, there were things said that have since been lost, and probably shouldn’t have been. Interestingly enough, the things were similar to what some of the Tea Party people have been saying. It was – is – the original sense of both protest movements.

And it is the idea or perception, rightly wrongly, that the elites in the United States are doing two things – one bad thing and one venial thing. The bad thing is that our elites – political, economic, cultural and academic – are making a general botch of things. They not doing their jobs, and/or they’re doing them badly. The venial thing is that they doing a bad job and taking care of themselves in the process, making sure there’s enough room in lifeboats for themselves and good luck to the rest of us.

The Tea Party said the same things, but in different ways. Tea Party supporters tended to aim at Democrats (don’t forget the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” whose votes for the health care proposal essentially were bought). Occupy supporters have tended more to aim at bankers, big business and other “big” institutions, with a lot of ire saved for the recipients of the “big” bailouts, engineered by Republicans and Democrats alike.

But they’re saying many of the same things. And once you cut away the political rants and posturing of both left and right, not to mention reelection politics, you see the message boiled down to what it is.

It’s about trust. There isn’t any left.

I don’t have good feelings about where this might lead. And so I do the only thing I know to do, the thing I should have been doing all along.

Pray.

Words, no conversation

RAGE against the man

bail out Main Street

not Wall Street help

the 99% not the 1%

                                                Communists Alinsky-trained

                                                or Bill Ayres inspired 1960s

                                                wannabes where’s the RAGE

                                                against Dodd and Frank

destroy capitalism, aka

corporate welfare

control by economic

elites – leeches

                                                politics of envy, spite

                                                it’s the election isn’t it

                                                divide and isolate

                                                shameful – vermin

gilded moguls

                                                spoiled children

                                                indoctrinated by the NEA

criminals in suits

crapping on society

destroying the

middle class

pay my college loans

                                                rapists, thieves, hoodlums

                                                defecating on sidewalks

                                                destroying parks

                                                defacing monuments

                                                co-opted by the unions

Occupy!

Take over!

                                                Remove!

                                                Eradicate!

dangerous plot

to control

all wealth

conspiracy!

                                                dangerous ploy

                                                to win reelection

                                                cabal!

                        screams forcing

                        to extremes

                        the curtain tearing

                        the fabric unraveling

                       

it will all end

                        like it always ends

                        badly

This poem is submitted to the Saturday Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets. Today’s prompt is to poetically write a conversation with at least two sources talking. Or perhaps not talking, as int his case. To see more poems, please visit dVerse Poets.

Occupy #AlloftheAbove!

I usually avoid politics here. I tend to the conservative side of things, but I have enough of a populist in me to keep things at least a little interesting. But politics is not the ruling passion of my life, and I prefer to talk about things here that are more important. (Did I really just say that? Something’s more important than politics?)

But the passion of my young friend David Wheeler, and the words of Christian and social justice advocate Jeremy John at Glass Dimly, have given me pause and set me to thinking about what’s been going on with the Occupy protests.

By personal history and inclination, I should be looking the protesters with something akin to ridicule and aversion. But I'm not. I see what's partially inspiring it -- people feeling betrayed by those who are (in theory) supposed to govern wisely for common good. I also see some of what Peggy Noonan talked about yesterday in The Wall Street Journal – it’s a protest, but it’s something else, to, a “be-in” but also a wave, “an expression of American discontent, and others will follow.” (Her column is behind the WSJ firewall, or else I’d link to it.)

They are more of us, of all political persuasions, who share similar convictions. We’re not going to occupy a park. We’re going to stay polite and not scream at TV cameras. We’re not going to throw things or spray paint on police cars. But we hear Herman Cain say the first thing to do is junk the tax code, and we think someone finally gets it. The system is broken.

This discontent behind the Occupy protestors is the same impulse drove millions into the arms of the Tea Party -- and forced the Republican Party elite to pay attention, at least for a time, before it tried to start using it for its own interests. Fortunately, the elite’s still having problems keeping the Tea Party crowd under control, and that’s a good thing. If the Occupy protests can do that to the Democratic elite, then that’s a good thing, too.

I see all the groups and factions trying to affix themselves to the Occupy protests -- the SEIU, what used to be called ACORN, groups making anti-Semitic comments, elements of the White House, Nancy Pelosi, movie stars who've done very well, thank you very much, by the system they love to bash -- and I step back. Way back. If that’s what it becomes, it will at best morph into a faction of the hard-core left, and its influence will be limited to the left-side of the Democratic Party (I know some people think there’s only one wing of the Democratic Party, but diversity exists there, too.)

Because history’s not a subject especially popular to be taught or learn in schools, we don’t see that movements like this (and the Tea Party) have happened before. It wasn’t for nothing that Mark Twain more than 100 years ago called Judas Iscariot a “premature congressman.” William Jennings Bryan rode the Populist movement, angry at the control of economic life by the railroads and other big moneyed interests, almost to the White House. These movements have effects, and often positive effects, and they are important.

But I know how all this works, too. We can have a President rail against the millionaires and billionaires, but it’s going to be people like me who pay all the taxes the President wants to raise. There are simply not enough millionaires and billionaires. We all forget that the so-called Alternative Minimum Tax was designed to catch those millionaires and billionaires who didn’t pay any taxes, and now it’s snared a very large part of the middle class.

This raging against the rich is a nasty impulse. Why people get mad at Bill Gates, who’s created wealth and jobs and value, and not at Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd – who’ve had a direct hand in fashioning the current economic disaster – is a mystery, and likely one with a political explanation.

Something needs to be done.

I wouldn’t ask the question like the bracelet does (“WWJD?”), but I do have to ask, what is my responsibility here as a Christian?

I can’t see Jesus advocating a violent overthrow of the government or whipping up people into a frenzy. I can’t see him calling for free college tuition (yes, that’s one of the Occupy Wall Street demands). I can’t see him using the protests to further the narrow aims of a labor union or to promote organic food (both have happened).

But I can see Jesus walking with and ministering to the unemployed, and the people whose lives have been wrecked because of the housing collapse, the banking bailout, the carmaker bailout, and all that stimulus money that somehow ended up in the wrong places, and all that green energy money that ended up in the coffers of a bankrupt solar power company.

And I can see Jesus shocking his disciples and everyone else by having dinner with the chairman of Goldman Sachs. He did something just like that, in fact; he tended to go where the sinners were, where the need for saving was greatest.

I can see Jesus overturning the moneychangers' tables - because the moneychangers acted with the approval of the spiritual leaders to defraud the people. That scene outside the temple was more about the people running the temple than it was about the moneychangers, and they got the lesson he intended them to get. Of course, they killed him for it, too.

Jesus was no stranger to confrontation. He used strong language. He called people’s hands.

But he also knew that the first line of battle was the heart, and that’s what had to be changed first.

Until that happens, nothing else will last.