In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street staged their first demonstration in Zucatti Park, New York City. It spread all across the U.S. and around the world. Since then, it has taken on many issues facing our economy and our society, shining a light on the inequities we have been suffering. Many cities, like Denver and Tucson sent in the police to break up the demonstrations. A photograph of UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper spraying demonstrators spread and became an internet meme as people around the world inserted the pepper spray photo into famous works of art and popular culture. So many incidents occurred from the first demonstration through the first half of the next year that I lost track of them. The police in many cities tried to stomp the camps out, made it so hard to continue that fewer and fewer people came out.
The difference between the primarily right wing Tea Party and the Occupy Movement is mostly that early on the 1% noticed the Tea Party and decided to co-op the whole group and finance them to fall in line with the doctrines they believed in. Slight herding toward the whole idea of "Big, bad government" caused most of the people in the Tea Party to follow the ideas of the very rich men who financed them and who used them to further the agenda of the 1%. The Occupy Movement, for whatever reason, couldn't be rounded up and turned in one direction. Too scattered, too loosely organized, they just kept pointing out the way our world was heading and no one was able to organize them to do the bidding of some smaller group. They never were really organized enough to harness the people power of everyone who wanted to participate. The housewives, retirees and just general people wanted to turn out but there was never any way to figure out where to go or when. once the Once the rich guys started taking an interest in the Tea Party, they paid huge amounts of money to get everyone out and participating. After the elections of 2010, when the Tea Party was very successful, their peculiar ideas of running a country began to get a lot more attention. While it benefited the very rich in America by keeping their taxes low and attempting to open up more and more freedom for equity traders, banks and other professions that the rich were major players in, their fiscal policies and obstructionist ways did nothing for the middle and lower classes. Funny how most of the Tea Party members are retirees and decidedly middle class people. Many of them still do not see how they were manipulated. If real historians are allowed to write history books in later years, it will be interesting how the Tea Party is treated.
The Occupy Movement is still alive and well. Recently, I saw a question posed on Facebook that wondered if Occupy had actually done anything or if it were relevant at all. I wasn't able to get that question out of my mind. I participated in some of the Tucson rallies but they have long since died away. They are still in our culture though. Without them, would any focus have been placed on the inequities of the direction our country has been pointed toward for so long? Since Reagan was in office, we have slowly headed away from the American dream and we have lost so much ground. Never paying attention to slight social changes, slowly our emphasis veered away from getting ahead and moved onto just making a living and getting by. No advancements were made by the middle class, after decades of building and re enforcing our lives after the second world war, the middle class of this country began to barely tread water and we never noticed the evil intentions of the "entitled" to turn us into a third world economy. If Occupy did nothing else from now on, they proved their value by waking us all up to the plans and plots already under way for decades.
The last election rousted people all over the country and we turned enmasse against the arrogance and lies thrown out by just one more elitist. The "Trickle Down" economic theory shoved dowm our throats for 40 years are throughly disproved. Our only hope is to harken back to the years when FDR turned us around and helped our country to heal. Whether you love or hate our current president, President Barack Obama, he has proven to most of us that he is just such a man that can heal us.
The Tea Party is fading out, their weird policies of blocking everything that comes up does no good for anyone. Their propensity of seeking out the oddest characters to run for them has bitten them squarely in the butt. They will be a blip on our national screen in years to come. On the other hand, the Occupy Movement has evolved into an organization that collects money and helps people who are hopelessly in debt. Students, mortgage holders and others have benefited from their charity efforts. When did a Tea Partier ever give anyone anything?
|
|
Comments