Visiting Blogger Barley Jim contributes the following
Images and impressions of OCCUPY BOSTON
Big, open to all, politeness everywhere with the occasional "call and repetition" communication, very counter cultural but very white, the youth predominate with more than a few of us gray beards though much fewer were those of middle years:
a women in a long hand made denim dress blowing bubbles
a young man in a handsome wool Ukrainian Army greatcoat picking up trash
a young mother, toddler in hand, slinged baby suckling under her red sweater
a suburban mother with her teenage daughter in for living history
a few requests for cigarettes
bored police sentries and even a fire marshal
more than a few of our "brethren of the streets" sojourning one more stop in the transitional housing process
I brought a donation of medical supplies; however, the authorities would not permit the presence of my box of insulin syringes
Politically diffuse with simple signs all about, a medical tent, small groups in quiet discussion, the more technologically inclined attempting to communicate with all the world
Spiritually diverse, energetic dancers under a large sukkat, quiet Methodists holding signs requesting social justice, a nicely decorated meditation tent
A kitchen area awash in aging apples and aged out butternut squash, an Asian woman looking for any of the "good cranberry nut rolls" (Iggy's?) to take home
I sat alone on the make do stage area, the embankment of a tunnel ventilation building, and looked to my right viewing an old five story brick building squeezed between much larger structures. Though built generations before my youth in the 50's, a time when this type and scale would still predominate and when beneath my feet the original Dewey Square tunnel, a seven million dollar tunnel at that time one of the widest in the world, was being built to carry Packards at a 35 mph speed limit and now is incorporated in the Big Dig to service far speedier Subarus.
How long will the human and financial energy that birthed and is maintaining this neo Hooverville be able to tolerate the non contributing energy of both voyeurs (LIKE ME) and the homeless? Is this concreted utopian patch too generous, too open, too accepting, too trusting and too loving to continue????
Written West of Occupied Boston
they have never studied political philosophy. they have been educated, for the most part, by marxist-liberal-progressive professors and teachers in the secondary schools. absent the faculty of critical thinking, thanks to the federal intrusion of our educational system, as well as sans the capacity to learn from history (the fact that all socialist systems are founded on violence, perpetuate violence, and birth an equality of poverty, and disempowerment) the wall street occupiers protest without understanding how to articulate the causes of the malaise. the cause of the malaise is self evident for those who have the eyes to see and ears to hear. that cause is government intrusion into the market place, crony capitalism, and the inevitable growth of fascism. what needs to happen is for government to be whittled back massively and for people to take responsibility for their lives, for the poor to be cared for by local institutions, for the Fed to be abolished, for a return to the gold standard, which would bind politicians from counterfeiting massively the currency, all at the cost of sacrificing the middle class. the pyramid of authority, as it now stands upside down, with a massive concentration at the top, has to be reversed, where the massive concentration of power is at the bottom, the local level. this vanquishes the possibility of crony capitalism and drains the system of its tendentiousness toward fascism.
ReplyDeletethere is much to this, obviously, but, this is a beginning point.