OpEdNews - Article: How The Occupy Wall Street / OWS Movement is Like the Space Program

note: this article is a further explanation of the response I gave in my interview on RT TV.

The other day, Matt, a 20 year old student who's taking a year off from college to participate in the Occupy Philly community, told me that even if the Occupy Philly community is shut down, the changes it has already produced will keep on making a difference. "It's getting people thinking," he told me.

But the Occupy movement is NOT being shut down. It's growing with explosive speed and energy. A member of the original New York Occupy Wall Street told me, when I asked how things will be different in four or six months, "We'll be wearing heavier clothing." This is a phenomenon that's set for the long haul.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is freaking out leaders on the right. Fact is, they are not scared or worried enough. The OWS movement is a huge, explosive development, with bigger more profound implications than they can imagine, just like the US space program had a much greater affect on every occupant of the planet.

Critics on the right deride the Occupy Wall Street movement as being unfocused, without specific goals or policies. It drives them crazy that there are no clear cut leaders.

Go to one of the Occupy city locales and ask to talk to a leader and you'll get a quizzical look, but no direct answer, and maybe a referral to a table where people focus on a specific topic-- Direct Action-- for example.

Ask about policies and you'll be invited to attend a general assembly, where occupiers use the "human mike" to amplify peoples' voices. (One person says a phrase, then a bunch of people repeat the phrase, so all can hear it-- an approach that was developed because bullhorns are not always available or permitted in Occupy spaces.)

The nature and character of the Occupy Wall Street movement make many mainstream media people and conservatives uncomfortable. They respond by attacking and attempting to marginalize the movement.

A Huffingtonpost article by Sam Stein suggests some GOP candidates are beginning to embrace the Occupy movement. I disagree. If the GOP presidential candidates are not attacking and villifying the movement, they're attempting to parasitize it by using the complaints of the occupiers as attacks on Democrats and or Obama, as Herman Cain did, suggesting that the OWS people should go to the White House. Cain doesn't get it.

Make no mistake, the only way the GOP candidates are embracing the Occupy movement is the way a lion embraces its prey.

One of the biggest criticisms of the Occupy movement is that it fails to define what it stands for, what it wants, how it's going to get it and what it's going to do. The right thinks this is a great way to mock the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I say the movement is doing great. The movement is not just another sit-in or march or protest. It's a major new phenomenon, a kind of social change invention. What the OWS IS is not as important as what it's becoming.

The OWS is, at this early stage, an amorphous, emerging embryonic entity and phenomenon. Like a human embryo at a very early stage, it looks the same as the embryos of many creatures. Further differentiation and unfolding of the genetic programming must occur to discover what an embryo will become. Time will reveal what the OWS movement will become.

The US space program was very much the same. We had no clue how the space program was going to develop or how it was going to affect us.