Several hundred participants turned up as early as 6:00 AM this morning to participate in San Francisco’s Occupy the Courts movement. The event was part of a nationwide protest to mark the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which granted corporations unlimited spending power via political action committees. As South Carolina prepares to vote in the 2012 Republican primary, the topic is a timely one.
Recent opinion polls consistently show a majority of Israelis optimistic about their lives and satisfied with the direction of the country, despite their massive support for last summer’s social protests.
The messages we take from the stories of homeless people, veterans, women, indigenous peoples, and volunteers involved with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate the keen effectiveness and high spiritual status of the international movement.
Watching the Iowa caucuses last night, the rising popularity of libertarianism really struck me. Although Ron Paul came in third place, he had near majority support among Republican voters under 30. If we are not proactive, libertarianism could be our future.
Wildfires in the arctic regions are increasing because the ground is warmer and dryer. So, in the midst of his busiest season of the year, Santa followed the work at the conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa very carefully. He reasons that no matter the state of development, every nation in the world will have to understand the truth of climate change and adjust their political economies to these new realities.
Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism. Both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.
On Monday morning I awoke before dawn and somehow managed to crawl out of bed, fumble my jeans and boots on, and sling my drum and backpack – the one that has become the indefinite home for my first aid kit, a patchwork bag of herbal tinctures, a squirt bottle half-full of milk of magnesia, a bottle of bubbles, and some lavender essential oil – over my shoulder. As I checked my back pocket one more time for my ID and locked the back door, the clock on the microwave read 5:08 AM. By 5:39 AM, I was snaking through the dark streets of West Oakland in what seemed to me to be a much-too-small crowd, mostly quiet except the occasional heartbeat of a lone drum or the sleepy but hopeful cheer that rose up as we passed under the overpass of Mandela Parkway. It was somehow comforting to hear our own voices echoing off the walls – it helped us remember our power. You better believe I was asking myself the same questions that CNN, the Huffington Post, the BBC, and Mayor Quan had that morning: Why on earth are we doing this?
I’ve noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to “distract” the citizenry from the wicked machinations of Republicans of the legislative class. Nonsense.
This sermon by Rev. Stephen Phelps, the interim Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York, is the first in an ongoing series of sermons by the Reverend. Romans 12: 1-13; Matthew 22: 16-22
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it this way:
a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass
of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society
formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . .
Call Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, or whoever is your mayor and suggest that they support the Occupy movement by providing encouragement to social workers, teachers, clergy and others to go down to the Occupy encampments and volunteer time and energy to help those who badly need this support!! Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments. From AlterNet by Joshua Holland, “What If They Sent in Social Services to Help Occupations Instead of Riot Cops to Bust Heads?”:
Occupations across the country have struggled to feed and shelter the least fortunate among us, and then faced often violent police crackdowns at great taxpayer expense. Pause for a moment and imagine what might result if mayors sent in social workers to help people rather than riot police to bust some heads? In a society that tends to avert its gaze from the homeless, the hungry, the addicted and the mentally ill, the Occupy movement’s compassion has become an albatross around its neck.