While Occupy protestors the world over claim that they are not in disarray. the evidence from both the Left and the Right shows an entirely different story. In Oakland we now have a shooting death, a Veteran in Vermont shoots himself, a man is found dead in a tent in Salt Lake City from carbon monoxide poisoning, there have been multiple drug overdoses, etc..
In New York, with OWS having over $500, 000 dollars to spend, the old saying that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” proves its enduring wisdom yet again. At last report, the radicalized Left, having their heads firmly planted in their ideological asses, will not allow any resolutions to pass without a 90% majority. There are eight shady unknowns holding the purse strings. They have become like the banks that the protest was about in the first place. The money just sits there, doing nothing, as infighting rages. Any one of these eight can veto any proposals before they even go to the general assembly. It reminds one a little of Eugene Richter’s decidedly prescient and frightening book, “Pictures of the Socialist Future,” which describes socialism spiraling down into the depths of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Hell, all you need is a simple majority in California and look how well they have done in the past when passing crucial legislation. So now a massive power struggle paralyzes the group in New York, with the spokes councils in deadlock with the general assembly. The spokes council organizational structure has been used historically many times, in Tiananmen square for one example, yet in this case it has been perverted and virtually destroyed by those corrupted by their new power.
The “Thought Experiment” is rapidly turning into one of the most embarrassing social movements in history. Zucotti Park has spilt into multiple camps, with battle lines drawn. This was the movement that proclaimed it was speaking for the other 99%, yet in a small park in Manhattan, New York they are essentially in an ideological war, split into not one or two camps, but several. Things are reported to be no different at any of the other Occupy camps throughout North America and Europe.
This author predicted all of this, and whether some of you pure romantics want to call me arrogant, addlepated, a sell-out, etc., the truth is, even in my own limited experience with those who are way far out there left, they tend to leave one with the feeling that perhaps they were beamed in from another planet. Something happens, and their brains begin to resemble potted plants more than a marvelous gelatinous mass housing billions of calculations a second.
Yesterday in Zucotti Park a fist fight broke out when one protestor held up a sign that proclaimed, “Food is for OWS only!” Others camped in another ideologically roped off area, now becoming actual physical barriers, yelled back at this group that this was “fascism” and the first group yelled back, “It’s only fair! We paid for it – it’s for us! You can’t just walk in and take our stuff!” Wow! Sounds eerily capitalistic to me. And the fists started to fly! Oh the union of the so-called 99% can’t help but be mocked as it stands now.
Those of the extreme Left have throughout history been decidedly solipsistic, arrogantly denying the shoulders they stand on, and history repeats itself, ad infinitum. Some of the most enlightened educated thinkers in the world were behind these protestors, offering constructive criticisms, wanting to help by showing what has gone wrong before and why certain well-trodden paths should be avoided at all costs. It is as if Libertarianism exists solely as a balancing counter point to the enraged, dogmatic, and disordered Left.
Humanity is indeed a complex, fickle lot. What it is that drives people to the extreme boundaries of the Left and the Right has been discussed for centuries and yet we still have no real clear-cut answers. For this writer at least, it’s often easier to understand the societal injustices that drive people to the Left than what drives people to the extreme boundaries of the Right. I can understand the extreme Right politic of those who are decidedly in the observed 1% – they are protecting what they believe is their right to extreme wealth. They are the plutocrats who control the world we live in, through their unerring ability to raise funds from like entities to fill the majority of governments’ seats with those who are ideologically bound together with little dissent.
Ideological/Political cohesion. It is this critical point that the main organized contingent of the OWS/99% movement has never been able to grasp. This is where those of us who have been 100% behind the movement have often sat for hours, dully staring in the dark of the night as another story of dissension, lack of cohesion and now fist fighting warring camps fills our screens. What makes the sadness so surreal is you hear over and over that this is a Right wing media spin on this rapidly unraveling chaotic movement – bullshit. These reports are filled with a sense of loss, frustration and disbelief from sympathizers all over the world who visit the sites and join General Assemblies etc.. This isn’t Right wing spin. The truth on the ground is reality enough and the Right continues the organized destruction of the movement. Unfortunately, they don’t need to do much at all. The implosion is coming from a fire lit from within, rather than the organized laying of siege to the encampments. This was obviously understood clearly by those in power right from the beginning. If a writer such as myself accurately predicted this debacle, as if I owned a crystal ball in Vancouver B.C., then one realizes there is a cadre of those who peer into these sociological crystal balls working for the élite Right.
As a blogger it is important to me to read many writers from every sphere of the political and economic spectrum. I spend a few hours daily reading Libertarian, Socialist, Conservative, and Liberal blogs, and the many that fill every available gap between these ideological camps. What I just can’t understand is how someone who professes to make $14,000 dollars in a year is behind the idea that Britain should reduce the minimum wage to ₤2.50 per hour, while another who makes even less proudly backs the British government’s plan to prosecute squatters with a minimum jail sentence of 6 months. In the same paragraph this blogger mentions there are 20,000 squatters in London and 650,000 empty buildings. They want to punish a group that they are only a hair’s breadth away from belonging to themselves – all of us are. Perhaps they believe this ill-conceived idea will prolong their spot in their own struggling and difficult place in life. It may be that this, in its barest of human simplicity, is what separates all of us – this unrelenting ego that hobbles so many, for much of their lives.
I suppose my own personal difficulty in life is one half of me is a romantic, and the other half is a realist. They say the two can never meet, yet my very existence proves the fallacy of this errant observation. The romantic in me wants to shout out, “Don’t you people realize that you are going to die? Seriously, what part of this don’t you understand? You are virtually at the bottom of the economic subsistence pile. You have just enough to buy food and pay rent for a flat in London, yet you are so decidedly Right that if someone suggested to take your nation’s poor and throw them onto a boat with some pigs and seeds and set them on a deserted island, you would be in there faster than a politician to a donation plate.”
This is the romantic. A deep melancholy rests on my shoulders each day as I see all the things I love, grow older, get weaker, and begin that transition to nothingness. And I wonder if, even with all the profound joys and personal victories that one can have in life, anything prepares any of us for the escalated losses which we each must face as we grow older. It doesn’t matter how much or how little money we each have as the end is always the same for all of us. There is nothing that we can take with us. We can leave the world a better place by just trying, yet we squabble about things that are so peripheral to our very existence that one wonders why so few see the tragedy of it all…the tragedy of wanting to be right even when we know that we can’t possibly have all of the answers 100% of the time.
We spend an inordinate amount of our lives fighting for extremes when there are simple logical answers for some of the most complex questions right before our eyes. With the inevitable deaths that we must all face, including our own, it would seem that empathy, forgiveness, hope, dignity, peace, and simple joy would be the things that we would cherish far above whatever ideological camp we think we belong to.
I’ve taken down the OWS/99% movement signs in my gallery and as with the other 98.5% of us not camped in occupying locations around the world I turn my eyes away. I can’t stand to watch any longer. Such a colossal waste of time. Some argue that it awakened the conscience of the world – and it did for a time. But those too extreme to understand that they were soldiers for the rights of humanity and not for their own beliefs rapidly took control of every group in the world. As a high level executive often has sociopathic tendencies so do those who believe that their beliefs are greater than everyone else’s.
And here I sit broken-hearted about a revolution that died before it got started.
peace,
R
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