Signifying nothing."
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19--28
I've been reading around the "interwebs" lately; that the #Occupy movement is losing steam. People are frustrated at the lack of direction and claim there is a movement within "the movement". I can't say that I agree that they are losing momentum, but I do see how people could be frustrated. I look to the faces of the people in this "protest" as it expands from "Occupy Wall Street" to "Occupy Everywhere" and I can't help but want to shout"
Occupy Yourself!!!
Before we proceed, allow me to clarify " I support the occupy movement 100%. I think that it is the most dynamic and important expression of humanity we've got going on right now. I look around at the world and there are so many reasons for people to be pissed off right now. So many people have lost so much; all they have left is their voice. If all you have is your voice then you need to get out and scream at the top of your lungs. As long as our voice is clear and we speak the truth, someone will listen. I firmly believe that this is merely a continuation of the civil rights movement. If we look back in time, the civil rights movement, started as a movement to grant equality to people who had been disenfranchised due to race and matured to a movement to grant equality to people who have been disenfranchised by poverty. Poverty has been at the core of every major civil rights issue since the beginning of time. If all you can do is create a spectacle and get people's attention; then go for it.
Make some noise!!!
Break some sh*t!!!
Stop the machine!!!
Trust me, I want to make some noise and break sh*t too. However that just isn't a practical plan of action for me right now. My guess is that it isn't a working idea for you either. But it sure as hell sounded cool. Maybe later"
All in all, this is just theatre; political theatre of the highest accord choreographed and performed, en masse, on demand. To garner the attention of a society that has turned its gaze away from the uglier and usually less entertaining side of life. All of this sound and fury has to come to something.
How did we get into this mess? What do we do to fix it? As a child I spent a lot of time with my grandmother who was born in rural Tennessee in 1918 and grew up during the great depression. She filled my head full of stories of the great depression. She would go on and on about what they had to do to survive. But she expressed to me how surviving wasn't enough. She expressed to me that they had to find their own way to thrive and be happy. Their little town got through together by creating a community and taking care of each other. When the New Deal was announced, people were more than ready to go to work helping each other out. When I asked her what caused the depression, she gave me a simple answer. Something that rings true to this day.
"Too many people went for easy money. So many regular folks thought they could get rich by investing, that many got swindled for their money. In the end. The people at the bottom, who had the most to lose. Lost the most. While those at the top, actually made money."
Kind of an eerie reflection of the last 20 years or so. If she were alive today she would say,
"We made it through then. We'll make it through now."
People just need to understand that sometimes it is going to hurt before it gets better. We can't keep chasing the easy money. Good ideas and hard work will get us out of this mess. We don't need to reinvent the wheel here; some ideas have worked in the past and could easily work again. One of my favorites tossed around at #Occupy events are the repeal of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act.
The Glass-Steagall Act included safeguards for both banks and people and it was repealed to give commercial banks the ability to take on more risks and "in theory", make more money. In retrospect, just like in the 1930's consumer banks lost money by taking on more risk. Probably, a good idea to put those rules back. It's not that I don't trust banks. I don't trust the people who work for banks. People are people. People are greedy, People lie, people steal.
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