Where X=the place being occupied
SHORT VERSION
The Tea Party and Occupy X movements have been inspired by citizens' unhappiness with government and business (particularly the finance industry). Are things so very bad that there is a real danger of revolution, or has a revolution already begun?
DETAILED VERSION (with links!)
I've seen some
well-spoken Occupy Wall Street activists with well-framed arguments (LINK).
I've seen some
frighteningly hysterical Monty Python-esque examples of groupthink at an Occupy Atlanta rally (LINK).
Today I was sent an interesting article called "
CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About... (LINK)" on one of those generic news aggregation sites (which I normally view as three rungs down from a 'legitimate' media source) so take it for what it's worth... but it's an interesting read and the article (which features chart after chart) is pretty alarming....
....in fact, the subtext of the article is SO very alarming that if the provenance of the charts (cited from various sources) should prove legitimate, the prospect of class warfare in America is all too real and all too present a danger. Certainly, some amount of our financial woes are linked to the
last time banks were under legislative directive to provide loans to the lower class - but this prolonged lack of engagement by the banking industry with the American public (as suggested by the charts in that article) is
astonishing.
So.
What are
we as a nation doing about it?
We have the Tea Party movement and the new Occupy X movement.
The Tea Party was the first widely recognized alarm that people were willing to stand up for change. This was a conservative leaning group whose most-resolved tenets called for "smaller government" - which means reduced spending by the government... in my opinion this is a generalized way of wishing for
smarter spending by the government. To my most liberal of friends the Tea Party is a bunch of racist kooks who are unhappy with having a black President in office and are agitating to help foment against President Obama having a second term. To my moderate friends the Tea Party movement has some delicious kernels of corny truth embedded in a giant turd of populist blather. To my conservative friends the Tea Party is a new route for conservative ideals, never coming out to state that they've lost faith in the Republican party. For many conservatives my age the only alternative to this point has been the Libertarian party, which as any politico can tell you is a preposterously schizophrenic push-me-pull-you of a beast.
As someone born and bred to Capitalism that system naturally makes more sense to me, as a result I am no fan of Communism as a model for a large nation to pursue; yet I understand the need for a complex societal model which includes social programs for those who are unable to succeed under Capitalism whether by physical affliction or cultural debilitation.
For me, at first blush, the Occupy X movement smacked of a modern Communist movement with touches of Neal Stephenson's "mobbe"; anarchists looking for a few good cars to burn. And, as you'll see in the article I've linked to, the conflict is indeed very much about labor versus capital. But now that I have a clearer idea about the shape of wealth and spending and "fairness" (a most whiny of terms that I associated with the Occupy X movement). But if politicians can rise to the top of the Occupy X movement (they're busting their asses to do that right now) and if the movement successfully avoids the Marxist overtones of the farcical Atlanta rally (linked above, I swear I had nothing to do with that) you might see a "new" liberal party emerge that sheds some of the ossification of the old Democrat party.
The fear I have with the rise of Occupy X and the Tea Party is that these could be two perfectly matched, perfectly polarized beasts with armies of people who have been "activated"... people who are willing to physically participate and are unable to consider negotiation with their dissenting opposites. It would be dangerous if these movements have none of the reason or flexibility or cordiality that the Republican and Democrat parties can still (occasionally) manage to pull off, even in
their state of extreme polarization.
How does a Leader get ahead of and productively channel the energies of an army (or two) of unemployed and disaffected civilians?
And who's going to do it first?
...