Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Many Sides of Occupy

Yes your voice needs to be heard. We should all speak up. There does come a point, however, when everyone is talking and no one is listening. Occupy seems to have been overwhelmed with a multitude of issues and a cacophony of voices.

Adbusters were the folks who started the Occupy movement, you remember a couple of tents in Zuccotti Park and the single phrase - Occupy Wall Street. They put out an excellent article titled the Battle for the Soul of Occupy. Now their fight is with the "remnants of the old left" as they state it but the dilution of the Occupy message is at the heart of the issue no matter who is putting yet another noun after "Occupy _______."

I spent time in the Occupy Oakland camp and Occupy Berkeley as well, here the problem was a multiplicity of causes and the tactics being employed. An article the Cancer in Occupy speaks to the local issues.

"Occupy Oakland anarchists, economic homeless, psychologically homeless and dangerous, street kids without cause or purpose, foreclosure occupy, education, occupy, native american occupy complete with their separate teepees and cloaked secret rituals whitey can't participate in."

Silence is complicity with evil but noise for the sake of noise is just that - noise.

Occupy Wall Street was attempting to address the income inequality and the greed and government sanctioned theft that Wall Street has become. But Is It (Still) Occupy is a question worth asking. I am not advocating for message purity but remember early on the media tried to dismiss the entire Occupy movement by asking: "but what is your message?" Now it appears they are too many causes, needs and special interest groups. All the while Wall Street lumbers on pillaging pension funds, draining homeowner equity and lining their pockets; all blissfully unregulated by the talking heads in Washington.

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