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Although I am financially sound, due in large part to having a stable partner who is also financially sound, my family is in shambles due to the economic collapse. In the last few months, two of my brothers were diagnosed with cancer. One of them has a good job, but is still looking at thousands of dollars in ‘co-pay’ for his treatment. He was already suffering under the crippling debt of his house, which is worth a third of the price it was when he bought it back in 2006/2007. My other brother is severely mentally handicapped, but found good employment with a ‘special needs’ work force, learned a bit about computers, and worked into his late 30’s before jobs began disappearing, and he now survives on a pitiful social security. He has Medical, but barely enough to make rent every month, much less pay for his own treatment, or the price of gas to drive to the nearest hospital (two hours away) several times a week. My mom is helping him to the best of her ability, but she is in her seventies, has arthritis and fibro, is living on her own limited SS, and honestly losing it because her mother is dying of terminal kidney cancer and two of her sons are currently battling cancer.
I give money to help because — as I said — I am surviving okay myself, as a teacher. However, everyone I love is in a perpetual state of fears and shakes, crying, in various states of dying, and collapsing under the financial burden of living in a society that has crippled even the healthy, which leaves the ill to be ravaged by vultures.
If you can’t look around and see the 99%, you either aren’t in it, are callously ignoring it, or are too dim to see the effects of it in every face on every corner.
The media is presenting this as a liberal-hippie clown show. They, and their corporate backers, have hoped that we’d remain so buried in the manipulative grasp of debt and marketing that we wouldn’t ever wipe the fog of branding and fear from our eyes long enough to really see what has been going on. At this point, though, how can we not see? How can we not stare into the face of the person next to us, the blank and useless window-eyes of the empty foreclosed houses across the street, the numbers on the page that say that one in nine lives in poverty, the enraged protesters lining the streets here, and in other countries, and not see the calculated exploitation of we the people?
For those who do not see that the 99% is you, realize that your relative comfort is bought with the discomfort of millions — including yourself — and the propaganda of corporations who want you to see the disparity and suffering as part of the terrifying ‘other.’ The more they can make you terrified and disdainful of the people seeking change, the more they can funnel you into a complacent little voting box, where you will continue to place a check next to the person who has sufficiently convinced you to accept conformity.
Their biggest fear is that you will realize who YOU are, and where YOU stand, and how YOU can make a difference, or at least try to.
This is not a patchouli revolution, if YOU get involved, as you should be. This is a protest that represents 304 million people, even if only a few thousand have bothered to take to the streets. 304 million people who are doctors, teachers, iron workers, police officers, military, business owners, secretaries, technicians, assembly persons, nurses, plumbers, pilots, engineers, skilled laborers, painters, contractors, servers, cashiers, caretakers, the unemployed, students, harvesters, children, bricklayers, loggers, farmers, artists, fireman, etc. There is no cohesive costuming there, no gender or racial boundaries. Such a thing is impossible when we are talking about 304 million people, out of a population of 307m.
These protests are all of us, but somehow a small faction is controlling it to look like a spoiled, sullen, irritated group of radicals. Somehow, even in something like taking to the streets to confront, assume and represent the face of this enormous population, we are allowing that same sliver of influence to shuffle us off into our shells of mistrust and fear, never to question the man behind the curtain because we are so afraid of the outraged audience in which we ourselves stand.
