The Left Column

Politics for Poets

Cleaning up Occupy

Is akin to changing a baby's diaper.

Nov 13, 2011

There is nothing wrong with being rich. The problem is with being unwilling to share. The problem is if you think that there is some kind of battle where you must be rich and everyone else needs to be poor. The problem is if you got rich by being immoral and doing sinful things. Yes, sinful things are the problem. Not being rich.

I guess it's just that when you are rich you have an augmented ability to do many various sinful things. But there are other temptations that you get when you aren't rich. When you are rich you can use the government, through eminent domain to steal people's property and then sell it to your shell companies so that you can then own that property. You can get the government to offer subsidies to build things that you needed to build anyway and were going to have to pay for yourself. Like wind turbines near your up-country estates. You can use your influence with judges to get charges reduced, fines eliminated, and fees gavelled away. You can have classes of people declared 'minority' and then, based upon categorizations that many find arbitrary, you can declare those 'minorities' as most favored for jobs and positions in schools and require less of them than of others to get to the same results such as a degree or a license or a job.

There is nothing wrong with being powerful. As long as you don't use your power to augment yourself at the expensive of others and in an unjust way. There is nothing wrong with being powerful as long as you are a humble agent of the better cause and not just a self-serving demagogue. Let's pray that we don't have any of those in our government!

Sunday Nov 13, 2011

Occupy Oakland: Police request that you leave. They have put up notices. Horrible murder near the scene on Thursday has people on edge. Oakland is a dangerous place anyway. The police are union people in a union town and trying to do things the right way. They point out that they need to get back to work doing their jobs in the violence torn city and stop baby-sitting squatupiers (they don't call the protesters squatupiers!)

Occupy Burlington: Man reportedly kills self in a tense scene with other occupiers. Situation was grizmal and could have been much worse. Protest scene declared a crime zone and protesters have evacuated.

Occupy Portland (Oregon): Arrests Sunday Nov 13

Occupy Denver: Crash a conservative blogger convergence. Conservatives 'want the dog', an inside joke. Protesters agree to leave when asked. One arrest.

Occupy Boston: No news today. Arrests last week.

Occupy Albany: The governor won't put up with it anymore. People being arrested.

Occupy New York: Still going on as of Monday, Nov 14. Diaper changing on Tuesday, Nov 15. The mayor says the protests can continue but that people can't camp there anymore.

Occupy Worcester: People were told: "don't try it"

Occupy Atlanta: headline about TB in the camp.

Oct 14

Finally: a protest the protest

Occupy the Occupy.

The problem with the 'protests' is that they aren't protesting anything. Actually they are just squatting. It's stage-show politics of the left designed to make it look like there is public support for causes that aren't even main stream. 'Good government.' Ya, everyone wants that. Some claim that is the government where they and there's always get there way. That is just the way that it is. To many this seems corrupt all the way through. There isn't anything we can do to stop it by squatting on the tarmac at a heliport-like park in a down-town.

Today I noticed that the stories about the 'Occupy' movement have been not put on the forward facing parts of the various web sites that I visit. For example the article about how the camps were taken down today in Oakland (in a 'peaceful' way, thank God) had only one comment tagged to it. Maybe I'm not connected to their discussion, but I seem to remember seeing a lot of comments on the day of the article about the riot two Thursdays ago. Not sure if the lack of comments means anything but maybe it means that the article at the Oakland Tribune didn't get a lot of review by site readers.

So will the protests go away just as they started? They seem to have fizzled out. The jamboree can't go on for ever. There are other problems that need solving. Lives need to be lived. Being cold, wet, and hungry in a crowd of strangers is a rough livelihood. When there is a bed and meal waiting for you elsewhere it is best to get to it when Winter comes. The rainy season is no time to be homeless by design.

There is an ironic quote today from a protester at http://www.mercurynews.com/occupy-oakland/ci_19331752 from who lamented how they had 'built a community' and "they can just come and destroy it."

Well, I guess that is how a lot of people feel about the occu-protestors. We've built a democratic republic here in America and the occu-protestors show up and decide that they don't need to use the Constitutional processes to effect change. We have a president whose latest quotes say such things as he is 'tired of waiting.' What is he going to do? Declare marshall law and claim he is doing it for the 99%?

And in a lot of there arguments the Occupy supporters still use the rhetoric of the idea of the 99%. The Oakland Police Union, in a release this week said that they also support the 99%. But they declare the 1% as law-breakers. they say :

"Our police officers are the 99% struggling in Oakland neighborhoods every day to contain the 1% who rob, steal, rape and murder our law-abiding citizens."

link at http://www.opoa.org/uncategorized/an-open-letter-to-occupy-oakland-from-the-oakland-police-officers%E2%80%99-association/

It isn't the same 1% that some of these protesters seem to be fixated upon.

shooting in the beautiful city by the lake!

There was a shooting last week right near the Occupy Oakland. That, coupled with other events such as what happened in Burlington, VT on Thursday (a tense situation where someone is alleged to have killed himself) and other activities, means that the Occupy movement needs to rethink their plans of continuous jamboree, like it is some rock-concert weekend camp-out that never ends like an anti-Dead-show from hell. I've written about such a thing in my novel Lost in New England.

Squatting in the down-towns of municipalities isn't a plan for better government.

It is time for the movement to morph into something else. I say go off and do the politics thing. But what they will find when they caucus is that they don't all agree on everything. As the drugs and marijuana wears off and they realize, "oh, hey, this isn't what we thought it was going to be. We don't agree with these other people." The groups will fracture. Hopefully many of them will come away with a sense of why such mass movements; that try to short-circuit democracy with jingoistic sloganeering, and an appeal to class-envy; do not work. People need to use the methods of democracy that are already in place. And if they want to add new methods it cannot happen by being declared as a fait accompli by the great-un-washed. That is mob rule and has been deprecated as bad for society by most of us older people who have had a lot of time to think about these things.

After a Dead Show people chill out for a while. They head back to their cars. They get their bearings. They go home. Or they go to the next show. The party can't go on forever in the same town, in the same park.

My main beef with the Occupy movement

I guess I object to a movement that has a rallying cry about 1% of the people being somehow morally corrupt and 'causing' the situation for the rest of us. I think that kind of simple-minded comic book view of human social order is dangerous. Maybe for kids (anyone under the age of 25) it is OK to flirt with that point of view. You rant about it at a college party and then have your friends tell you you are an idiot for thinking that way. They read you the riot act about tolerance. They remind you that even though enforcement of laws is often only for those who are egregious law breakers (that 1% that the Oakland Police Union say "rob, steal, rape and murder our law-abiding citizens") the laws apply for those people too. The criminal has rights.

So even if it could be proven that there are bad people stealing stuff from everyone else and preventing us from having our grand gathering together (the occu-protestors being just one such group wanting to gather together, there are many such groups. The Tea Party. Dead heads.), even if it were criminals or whoever-have-you that are harshing everyone else's mellow . . . even the harshers have rights. The laws are written for 100% of the people: that is called equal protection of the law. And since the laws are written for 100% of the people, you would think that a rhetorician would know such a thing. A politician who panders to the occu-protestors view of the bad 1% should know better. They might agree with the Oakland Police Union's idea of the 1% as those who "rob, steal, rape and murder" others. Equal Protection under the law isn't just for law-abiding citizens. Even law breakers will get equal protection of the law if the law breaker is being robbed, raped, or subject to mayhem or attack.

So, given the serious nature of real crime, the law enforcers have decided that it is best to let the protesters move along. And let us hope that this is a civic lesson for those of them who have the capacity to understand. They learn what others learned long ago: that the system is mostly not broken. Protests need to be focused and be short-term in a just society. We have mostly a just society. And protesters must respect the rights of others: even they that get deemed to be of some disfavored group. It is especially the minority that needs to be protected from mob justice. When crowds demonize other people they can turn ugly and become mobs. That is what police and law enforcement are supposed to help prevent. Those who watch these kinds of things note if a politician or political party panders to the idea that there is some evil group, say a 1%, that is rich and is a 'problem' and needs to be 'dealt with' and that they are 'tired of waiting' and that the 'rest' will 'take things into their own hands'. The rhetoric that politicians use that is deemed scape-goating is also noted by those of us who watch these things form the sidelines. We may not say it out loud to you how creepy you sound when you pander to scape-goaters. But we surely consider what a vote for a scape-goater means. We will consider that we won't vote for people who use the rhetoric of demonization. If you demonize any group and single them out as villains, then you may be deemed as un-fit to lead. You will be voted out of office.

But those who read history know how things can break down. We read about what has happened elsewhere when the same demons that this current crop of demagogues seems to be channeling were possessing the leaders of other nations in ages past during the Third Reich, The Soviet Union, The French Revolution. We don't want those things here and we expect that our politicians would understand that the rhetoric that they use matters. They should speak of equal protection under the law and not scape-goat the rich.

Equal protection of the law means that laws apply the same no matter who you are: even if you are too rich for your own good and too stupid to share the wealth that you can afford to share. The politicians that know that fact are worthy of a second look. Anyone who doesn't seem to get that concept should be overlooked in the voting booth. Vote for someone else.

Oct 15, 2:28 AM

reports from New York that the jig is up there in Zuccotti park. Seems like the basest form of grunge-puppy hypnotized 'do-gooding' types are the only ones left. Very ugly comments in the comments to that article. There is still a lot of prattle of 'we are the 99' or 'the greedy 1%' and other nonsense. Do these people even realize how rediculous they sound? They want change but they want to effect it through bullying. The lawlessness of it all has finally made those who pander to it give in to the fact that they need to clear these occusquatters out of these city centers.

here is the article:

"Hundreds of NYPD cops surround Zuccotti Park and order Occupy Wall Street protesters to clear out" at: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/hundreds-nypd-cops-surround-zuccotti-park-order-occupy-wall-street-protesters-clear-article-1.977430#ixzz1dkzp2neR

Woke up this morning to the news that I read late last night (at 2AM) about the New York protests getting a 'cleaning.' Actually it is kind of like a changing because Bloom-bot is still pandering to the protestors saying that they can come back but that they just can't stay. And the parts of the press that are controlled by the Euro-socialist-internationalists have dropped the story (as I commented upon above). From the WSJ (not Euro-socialists) I read the following article:

Police Clear Zuccotti Park

Occupy Wall Street Protesters Arrested in Unannounced Raid

by By JESSICA FIRGER, ANDREW GROSSMAN, and PERVAIZ SHALLWANI

There is an interesting quote of an exchange between a person leaving the scene and an officer where the protester (who has the same last name as the Socialist Senator from Vermont, and the same initials) says "We're trying to change the world!" The officer reminds the fellow that the rule of law applies and the police are following it. This exchange is often quoted in the comments section of the mentioned article.

When I read the quote I was reminded of a statement that I made up years ago, a small joke of mine that plays on the word 'change' and that word's many meanings. Here is the joke:

I would like to change the World, but I can't find a diaper big enough.

Humorous beat. This is my joke so if you pilfer it please you need to reference me and pay me if you use it (that would be the right thing to do). And so a variation of the above, applied to the protesters, could be something like

standup comic

Did you hear that the protesters occupying the park down in New York, and in other cities, finally has gotten the change that they needed. But worry not, all of you who support them, even though they've been made to leave it isn't to stop the protests but to sanitize them. So it's more like a diaper changing. (a beat) Change we can use.

Hey, kids, everyone wants you to have opinions about the government. But there are some opinions that we notice from those who are politically hypnotized by some poopy aspects of various ideologically motivated politicos. It is a disrespect for power and authority as if the entreat to fix what is broken is a broad-based call of protesters (whoever they are, of whatever political persuasion) to change whatever it is that they imagine is broken, even if they know nothing about the system that they claim to want to fix. It isn't just leftists that do this.

Yes, it isn't just leftists that want to fix things that they can't possibly know are broken or not broken. More damage is done imaging that things are not right and then trying to 'fix' non-existant problems. I've said it here before, and it bares repeating (this is politics for poets, and poets like to repeat themselves):

Most things about government and society are not broken and do not, in fact, need any fixing.

And so, analogous to the Occupy Protesters wanting to fix the broken things about Wall Street, there are right wing folks who want to fix the welfare system. So, when they first get to that place where they notice that something is not quite right about the way that welfare works they go on about how 'lazy' people are and say things like "why don't they just get a job." And act as if anecdotal fraud is wide spread and rampant. It may be, but they don't really know. And even though they do not know the real truth and may not, in fact, know anyone who is on welfare, they say that they know even when they don't. It is a mistake that we all make all of the time. We imagine worse case scenarios and then we blame the rest of the world for these things that we imagine as true as if they really are true when we don't really know. This is what people do when they make up scenarios about loved-ones cheating on them. I've seen people become jealous about things that they imagine are happening, that aren't really happening at all. This is what people do when they guess the motivation of others in traffic and then flip the finger and curse at someone else driving in a different vehicle because they imagine that person as a bad driver. They do the knee jerk disrespect. This is what people do when they dehumanize anyone and imagine them as representative of the whole group of who they are that one imagines them to be. So we see someone with darker skin talking in a dialect that we imagine as part of the 'other group.' It could be an Italian guy in a neighborhood of Dutch people. It could be a Cape Verdian in a neighborhood of Irish. It could be a American Black in a neighborhood of people who are mixed (but still call themselves Black). People imagine this other person as representative of 'the other' group. The idea that people are different based upon skin color is correct in some ways but very very wrong in so many others. We would be fools to imagine that there are not differences. If you ask an Italian 'who do you love?' you will probably get 'family' as one of the answers. In the real world a family is often genetically similar. And thus the family is like its own tiny little minority. It is the most preferred minority and we give pull to anyone of the family because that is just the way that we do it. (of course, and I assume that readers know this, I am painting in a brush of expectation. I am putting the family at the top of the list of important things). And that is OK. And if I favor some things about my family over others, that is OK too.

What isn't OK is when nepotism and favoritism bleeds into areas that really should be for the public and for other citizens. People extend their idea of family to include friends. And beyond that, people of their own neighborhood. Beyond that, maybe a parish or a congregation (and the common humanity of all mankind . . . are all to be respected within the sacred space). All of this is normal and observable behavior.

What is also normal and observable is how nepotism works. It is how cronnie capitalism works. It is the way that loosely connected political fiefdoms that form into political parties work. The Republicans and the Democrats both have these seedy aspects of normal behavior. We read that a favored insider company is afforded sweet-heart deals. We often just zoom right by those kinds of stories on our list of things we might want to read because such corruption is not unexpected within that realm of all things under the sun. And even though crony capitalism is normal and obeservable, it most certainly is not Kosher, nor is it good governance.

And since crony caapitialism is not good governance, because it favors the few, we have some groups of well-connected people who have their open vein into the public coffers. They leach off of the  system. They get special treatment. They get to decide how much they get. And the system is set up now so that a very favored group is able to not just get preverred treatment, keep up their strongly insider club of favored people (and seemingly nepotistic and tribal behaviors) going and the rest of us have to keep paying for it. Who are those people who are doing this? Do those people, in fact, really exist? What do you think?

But the fiction is always there with a public institution such as government that things are set up in what is deemed a 'fair' way. What we notice, however, is that all people are equal but that pigs are more equal than others. And who is the pig? Who gets to say who the pig is?

Do we dare say who the pigs are? Do we ever really know for sure? In the Parable of Lazarous and the rich man who dies, Lazorous is with Abraham, who was a very wealthy man. It wasn't that the rich man who died was a bad guy becuase he was rich! If so then Abraham would not have been in Heaven with Lazarous!

In another ancient story the ones who are pigs are only that way because an evil sea-witch as transformed them into such. And the story progresses and the pigs are turned back into sailors. And so, in a story of Wall Street, if people are deemed 'pigs' by the story teller and the story listener do we write the story that they are pigs for the slauter or are they pigs to be transformed back into human-beings?

No one will like being deemed swinish

If you are one who would boldly say to some well-off person that they are a 'pig', don't expect that that person is going to then be all eccumenical and give you 'I feel your pain' entreats. Calling someone a pig is a term that many find derisive. Some people find swine to be exceptionally horrible and the idea of pigs and pig things makes them cringe. They do not like pigs and will not eat pork and it is a major insult to be called a pig.

As the Jesus parable tells us: the lack of virtue is really not connected to the idea of one being wealthy if one is called out as being sent to Hell. The lack of virtue that makes one sinful in that story is about something else. It is about heedlessness to the suffering of others. It is about lording over people who are lowly. It is about not sharing, not caring. It is about not helping those in need when it is easy or necessary. Are there people who are considered wealthy that are like this? And if so, how do we even know who they are? And if we do know who they are that are heedless and do not help even when they need to help, then how do we, in a moral way, get these people to put in the effort that we deem to be their moral duty?

To get people to put in the effort that we deem to be their moral duty is the task of good governance. And we ought to try to do it in a way in which people feel good about doing it. In the moralists view of things we would hope to see that behaviors that display Charity come spontaneously and with real effect. We have a concern for the soul of the person who we would wish to be charitable. However there is the idea that real charity is done in secret. So, given this idea, we can not know that someone from whom we request charity has already done enough. They have done enough and they can't do anymore becuase if they give more then they will put themselves into a troubling situation. So we ask them to give and they don't. Do we then condemn them for it?

And so, given that so many who ask do expect something, it is very common for folks who are wealthy to always have some small amount to give even when they already have done proper titheing. Call it a cost of being wealthy. So someone like a Rockefeller has a pocket full of dimes that they hand out to anyone who asks. (back in the day).

And to be honest about what the wealthy have done in the past: Solomon built a temple. Henry Ford set up his foundation. Danny Thomas funded children's cancer research. There are just three, off the top of my head.

here is a snarky thing to say to someone who asks for change on the street:

"The kind of change you need I can't give you. You have to find that for yourself"

You might get a laugh from that, or may be the person will benefit to hear it from you. But  it would be very mean to say this to the wrong person, someone who is truely in need. And how do we know? We have ways of knowing. Jesus says to give to everyone who asks. In the case when it is impossible to help with cash, or what they ask for, then, I suppose we could use the excuse to give them prayer. Some will find that a cop-out. And you will be derided and scoffed at by many if that is what you say you do to help. Never-the-less, prayer does work. So give the prayer at least is what I recommend. A heart-felt 'Oh, Lord, please bring to this person the material and spiritual things that they need.'

But it is hard to not give when being begged to. For example a homeless alchoholic might just take the money you give them and drink it up, and thus add to their problem. So what you can do is find a homeless shelter for alcholics and donate to them. Then you can suggest to the alchoholic that they go to this particular facility. And so, even though they didn't give cash, they did give: a place for the person to go.

And if you don't do this? If you don't give something of yourself? What happens to you then?

I think I've blogged enough today.

Life goes on.

Nov 15, 2011

~ OK Now.

Summer is nice on Horseneck Beach!

The Susquahanna River, Pennsylvania from
last fall.

Thoughts of Blue.
 
         Which blue did you mean
     because there are very many of them
    all of them with potenially trademarked names.
   The multiplicity of them 
      could make anyone exclaim
  how could I ever know 
     which blue to expect from you?

  That crystal glass blue?  The color
       of an old bottle, blue?
   the otherside of the sky at sunset blue?
       The blue of Farmer's eyes?

   And when the lights are out
     in the middle of the night
  walking up the hill through the trees
      I'll know where to go,
        where to sit down and rest.

  Midnight blue with you blue?
   which blue?
    Because there are very many blues.

from poem page 137