Watershed Moments
Yesterday I wrote about what I think is going to happen as a result of the 99% Occupy Wall Street movement. Today I’m going to imagine what it will mean for us. I’ve been curiously amused by media coverage of the protests (where there is any) because it so comically misses the point of all of this. It’s like the story of the blind men and the elephant. They each feel a different part of it, so one thinks it’s a pillar after feeling the leg, one thinks it’s a rope after touching the tail, one thinks it’s a branch after holding the trunk, and so on. They all completely miss the fact that there’s an elephant in the living room.
My life history has been based around a narrative of failed potential. If I feel anything, it’s probably the rear of the elephant, or more likely the point of its tusk or the underside of its foot. The crazy thing for me to wrap my mind around is that I got down from atop the elephant and then laid in front of it and didn’t move out of the way as it walked over the top of me. I fully accept the fact that I’m in control of my life and brought much of my misery on myself. But I will never forgot the nonchalance of the elephant as it applied stronger and stronger pressure, eventually doing a handstand on a single foot centered on my groin. And when I look around at the 400 human pyramids struggling as hard as they can to each support an elephant, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps they are beginning to realize how strange it is that we do this.
Regardless of our life experience and political persuasion, we all see the same thing. America keeps the top secure. However, the rest of us should get a job. We need to grin and bear it and stop complaining. We should try harder and stop slacking. We shouldn’t speak up when something’s wrong in the workplace or we might lose our job. We need to focus on paying our health insurance in case something bad happens. We have to save as much money as we can so we can afford to send our kids to college. Politicians have our best interests at heart as long as they are part of our political party. We can succeed if we just have faith.
If that paragraph sounded sarcastic to you, congratulations, you’re probably a progressive like me. If it sounded at all serious, then you are probably conservative. But we share the burden, even if we don’t see an elephant. We’ve both spent the last 30 years seeing no real increase in our middle class incomes even though the country has gotten an order of magnitude more efficient and productive. We’ve watched health care costs on the aging plunge them into poverty. We’ve watched public university costs skyrocket to the level once held by private colleges. The elephant was always there, and more and more of us have opened our eyes to it and jumped out of its way.
So you see, a lot is at stake here, because this is a battle of perceptions and ideas. We’ve become our own slave masters. Our chains are our sense of duty and obligation, held by the ultra rich job creators who want us to think we have nowhere else to go. If even a few people at the bottom of the pyramid decide to no longer participate, the pyramid crumbles.
When I see things like 100% of senate republicans rejecting Obama’s jobs plan because it raises taxes by half a percent after the first million dollars, this is the reason why. It isn’t about logic or what’s right and wrong or anything like that. It’s because the Tower of Babel we’ve built in America is so high now that it has a long way to fall. Tax rates on millionaires and billionaires were twice as high between the Great Depression and Reagan’s election as they are today. That means we could pass a jobs bill like this over 100 times and still not reach the tax rates we had during the peak from 1944 to 1962 (some of the most prosperous years in our nation’s history).
The 1% don’t want to compromise at all, because if they do, it’s a slippery slope to losing the position of power they’ve held for 30 years. They’re afraid we’ll find it’s easy to relinquish them of their power because we’re the ones that lent it to them in the first place. But I think we’ve reached a tipping point where the country’s health has deteriorated so much that it can no longer sustain itself in the way it has up till now. We can’t even pay the interest on our debts, much less the principal. We can’t afford to take care of or educate ourselves.
It’s like the pyramid is not just holding up elephants, it’s also being inundated by water. Even if we wanted to hold them up, we’ve begun to drown. It’s almost amusing to think of all these elephants having to soon swim around with the rest of us, but you have to consider that from their point of view, they brought this on themselves, in much the same way we brought on our servitude. Their nature is not to admit it, but to spray water on us until they find a new pyramid, and that’s ok. Our job is to buck them off our backs.
Imagine the country has been locked in a kind of primordial swamp for 30 years. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t swim through the muck so we got stuck. It never seemed possible that the swamp might eventually overflow its boundaries and drain someday through a crack in the shore. We always knew that something beautiful was hiding beneath the waters but we thought we’d never see it.
Well, we’re going to see it soon, and it’s going to be wonderful. Could you imagine reading a post like this during the Bush years, or under Clinton, or Bush Sr. or Reagan? No, it would have seemed ridiculous, like bell bottoms and tie die. But today you can feel it in the air. It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue and dancing along our fingers. Something has changed in our thinking, as a culture. It’s no longer acceptable for politicians to take bribes from corporations and hang the rest of us out to dry, so they have to go. People from all walks of life and political persuasions agree on this.
It’s extraordinary that the most patriotic thing you can do right now is be yourself and fight for what’s right in your heart as an individual. It’s never been easier to be part of organizations that effect real change in the world, and they’ve never been more receptive to the really big ideas, the game changers.
With some of the smallest early barriers out of the way, like ending corporate campaign financing so normal folks like you and me can get elected, imagine how that would change our democracy. If our politicians weren’t spending every waking moment raising money, imagine the things they could accomplish as our elected representatives, like they used to do in our grandparents’ day. It will mean an end to gridlock. There is a cascade of change coming, starting with something very basic like ending corporate personhood. The thousand changes beyond that will reveal themselves once the water recedes.
This is a watershed moment in our history.
