Forum Post: Justification and Potential

There's something legitimate in this protest, despite the diffuse qualities.

I’m sensing some urgency and common intent here in calling attention to the criminal racket behind the majority of our problems.

Maybe it’s just a brief opportunity to bridge divisions left and right in order to finally nail this otherwise amorphous, creeping horror that we have not been able to name.

And when we miss the mark in naming it, we name scapegoats in its place, most of whom are, in fact, symptoms of the sickness, not causes: terrorism; welfare cheats; immigrants. All of these are real problems we face, but serve merely as scapegoats because they are merely coughs and sneezes to an unnamed flu.

Eisenhower’s military/industrial complex was on the mark, but is no longer sufficient to convey the depth and breadth of this sickness. The problem has grown to include not only the military and its industries, but senatorial, representational, presidential and local branches of government, and our own minds and hearts, colonized relentlessly by propaganda, media and advertising. But such an overwhelming problem can’t be grasped, and when it can’t be grasped it also can’t be seen as real or as something that can ever be different.

We needed to find a word somewhere between perfect accuracy (trying to capture the whole of it) and perfect precision (trying to capture the overwhelming details of the problem). That’s why, for now at least, “Wall Street” is general enough to make the broader connections and precise enough to expose the trunk from which so many branching problems stem: – the buying of government; the replacement of “public good” with “private profit”; what influences our foreign policies; why we wage the wars we wage; how we relate to our land and health; how our tax money is spent; who has real power and privilege; who are the biggest welfare queens; why the worst financial criminals in history are honored by media and government; who justice serves; how the courts define a person; whether we are citizens or consumers; how deeply we are brainwashed.

It’s not a conspiracy, but a kind of arachnoid cancer that grows tentacles in all directions without plan, organically, leaving an interlacing network that can be traced . And this protest wakens people to how this cancer has worked its way through the entire body politic, starting and stopping with big money. Follow the money and you follow the growth of this disease.

The phrase helps us make manifest what we otherwise unconsciously accept as inevitable and ungraspable. There are deeper roots, of course, going all the way to the taproot, how we imagine our world. For our actions stem ultimately from our philosophies and beliefs. But so long as we remain accurate in our assessment (if not precise in an ultimate sense) the urgency this generates can carry us into greater precision. But it must start with some accurate and communal acknowledgement of the depth and breadth of the problem.

This protest, therefore, may do something different than merely beg leaders for ultimately superficial alterations in practices and laws and regulations (aka “demands”). It seems to be waking us out of an unconscious acceptance of a condition we have not been able to identify. The intent is not so much to change others or government (which is begging, which is still the serf relating to the master). It’s changing ourselves, it’s finding in one another a confirming awareness of the nature of what we face and that we ourselves hold the key to refusing to bow down before these corrupt Lords and Ladies. And this newfound power may indeed take us into greater depths.

For we’ve faced the problems of “wall street” many times already in our collective history – they weren’t dressed in business suits but in the robes of kings or emperors or tribal chieftains. And it’s our mind that ultimately gives rise to these perpetual divisions between the haves and have-nots. But I believe we can address the problem on more than one level at a time.

Ultimately, and ironically, philosophy is the most practical way of addressing the problems we face, but how many can understand that fact, how many see the urgency of that fact? At least in this protest we might sense for the first time in a long time a trace of that authentic urgency that might carry us deeper; an urgency to face our collective errors and deficiencies and diseased approach to life (aka “wall street”) squarely, and in so doing step together toward a common good, thereby discovering the power to change ourselves. That’s the energy and potential I sense in this uprising. That’s what makes it different