Occupy Wall Street

Uploading videos is something I haven't learned to do so I will direct you to the sidebar on the right and the blog called Time Goes By. Today's post includes a video from an Occupy Wall Street gathering at Columbus Circle in NYC last night. It's dark so it's hard to tell how big the crowd is but it's big. The video features Pete Seeger [age 92 and going strong], Arlo Guthrie and Tom Chapin and many others, playing guitars, flutes, etc and all singing "The Little Light of Mine, I'm going to let it shine>"

And I have a fit of nostalgia for protests I didn't take part in back in the '70s because I was on my Mommy track in a staid small town in upstate New York. But I had been with the civil rights people in the '60s and was with the anti-Vietnam people in the '70s. Watching this four minute clip and hearing the familiar song, I'm once again with a protest in my heart.

Yesterday's documentary movie was Food, Inc. which emphasizes the hydra-like reach of big corporations controlling what we American eat -- what is in our supermarkets and why junk food is actually cheaper that "real" food [the answer is partly government subsidies that benefit the big corporations].

While the "serious"people complain that the Occupy Wall Street people don't have an agenda and don't stand for anything concrete, they are wrong. The movement stands for the extent to which our choices, even of what we have available to eat in this richest of nations, is controlled, what we see on television and read in papers, what we are charged for for health care, how our schools are run, on and on and on ... are all controlled by corporations who are now defined as "People" by the Supreme Court. But these "people" are essentially robot without a heart or even a head, merely a counting system ruled by bottom line numbers. Many of the most basic choices humans have always had are severely limited by what Wall Street stands for. No, it's not as simple as saying "stop this war" or "give black people equal rights" -- it's become too invidious to define in a few words. We know we are controlled, we are constantly spied on, we are overcharged for inferior services and goods and we are being milked like docile cattle of our savings so that a few rich people can grow richer and richer.