Forum Post: Why THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT is thousands of years old -------------------------

GypsyKing just posted a link to a provocative song by Leonard Cohen. "Freedom will come from the shadows" sings Cohen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJp9bHMTy1w&feature=related .

Listen to the song sometime. But to save you time right now, here's the point: The efforts of millions around the world have and will now (as the great Dostoevsky put it in the Brothers Karamazov) "keep the great idea alive." We justify and honor the love and sacrifice that came before us by loving and sacrificing now. And because we, the millions, will win, the sacrifice will not be in vain.

Again and again the wheel turns. Our strength comes from knowing that it is a circle, not a line. We are rising once again. Humanity is rising.

As the celebrated radical Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: "Truth crushed to earth rises up...The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice."

Just as they have throughout the ages many well-meaning people decry the disorder that the occupy movement has created. But they forget another line by Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The presence of order does not imply the presence of justice."

I think Vincent Harding had it right when he said (I'm paraphrasing here): I find unsatisfying those analyses that contend that capitalism is the true root of the problems in America and around the world. There is something else at work here, something deeper, a loss of attunement, a lack of sense of self. And I believe there can be no justice on these shores (or any others) if we do not address the issue of the human spirit.

Dostoevsky seems to have addressed this lack of attunement described by Harding (and the hope described by King) when he wrote the following in the Brothers Karamazov (note 1: All 6 of the following paragraphs are Dostoevsky's words. Note 2: I wish he'd used more inclusive language of humankind rather than mankind but I'll give the accurate quote):

"Today, everyone asserts his own personality and strives to live a full life as an individual. But these efforts lead not to a full life but to suicide, because instead of realizing his personality, man only slips into total isolation. For in our age, man has been broken up into self-contained individuals, each of whom retreats into his lair, trying to stay away from the rest, hiding himself and his belongings from the rest of mankind, and finally isolating himself from people and people from him.

And while he accumulates material wealth in his isolation, he thinks with satisfaction how mighty and secure he has become, because he is mad and cannot see that the more goods he accumulates, the deeper he sinks into suicidal impotence. The reason for this is that he has become accustomed to relying only on himself; he has split off from the whole and become an isolated unit; he has trained his soul not to rely on human help, not to believe in man and mankind, and only to worry that the wealth and privileges he has accumulated may get lost.

Everywhere men today are turning scornfully away from the truth that the security of the individual cannot be achieved by his isolated efforts but only by mankind as a whole.

BUT AN END to this fearful isolation is bound to come and all men will understand how unnatural it was for them to have isolated themselves from one another. This will be the spirit of the new era and people will look in amazement at the past when they sat in darkness and refused to see the light. . .

. . . Until that day, we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, even if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up in an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God's fools.

This is necessary to keep the great idea alive."

The Rastafarian poet Bongo Jerry echoed Dostevsky's sentiment when he wrote this:

"Sooner or later but mus' the dam going to bus' And every man will break out And who will stop them? The force? What force can stop this river of men who already know their course?"

The people, united, can never be defeated. Here's to millions of people, past, present and future who have kept and will keep "the great idea alive." When you look back, you realize that the occupy movement is thousands of years old.