The top one
percent has displayed an infinite and hugely impressive amount of genius and
ingenuity, albeit in violation of every level of the law; let them turn these
skills toward the above bulleted list and cure it, with all those principles
they profess in church once a week. The ultimate challenge posed by their Lord
Jesus Christ is to love the enemy and be loved back by him/her. Thus enmity
disappears.
********************************
In Danny's words, the book is " a
collection of my reports and commentaries as
I played participatory journalist, reporting less
on the day-to-day than on deeper trends."
He goes back in recent history to his own neglected prophecies, published as
blogs, books, and films, of the imminent financial collapse and then his first
efforts , beginning on Wall Street in 2008, to initiate the occupation; then to
his colleague David DeGraw's
distillation of the huge showdown as the 99 percent versus the one percent, a
crucial step in any movement--power of the word--and how the actual occupation
proceeded quickly to take shape soon thereafter.
The date September 17 has joined a
pantheon of unique occasions identified calendrically, and its own significance
is dissected in terms of other important events that transpired on other
September 17's:
"September 17 is the anniversary of the signing of the United States
Constitution. Years later, on that day, Francis Scott Key finished the poem
that was to be turned into the "Star Spangled banner," our national anthem. It was the day of the
battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in the American civil war. It was the day the Camp David agreements
between Egypt and Israel [were] signed, and it was the day that the New York Stock
Exchange reopened after the attack on 9/11."
Danny reiterates an MLK quotation he used
in his review of the dedication of the MLK Memorial: "History may not repeat itself
but can reveal similari ties of spirit and
political learning cur v es. Because #Occupy is new as well as old. In a
December 30, 2011, posting, Michael Moore names December 30, 1936, the day that
the UAW was born, as "the first Occupy":
"75 years ago today--hundreds of workers at the General
Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them
for 44 days. My uncle was one of them."
After the success of that movement, other occupations
"spread like wildfire," as did the "wildfire" of self-immolation kindled by the
defiant Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who, in the words of songwriter David Rovics,
"[s]truck a match that lit up all the Earth."
Did the first occupation ever occur in Flint? I daresay it
may have occurred in Genesis, when the people united to build that ill-fated
tower, another 99 percent versus the one percent. Or even earlier than that?
Don't mean to blaspheme.
And forget not that our autumn
rising was inspired by the Arab Spring, which in turn was reinspired by it, as
the Egyptians returned to Tahrir Square when the military that replaced Mubarak
began to settle into disappointing complacency.
#Occupy received press once the
presence of so many international journalists paved the way for our own
"infotainers"; we received a google of Google hits; we raised money--$483,000 by
October .
Danny not only offers us the
details and the holistics, from the nitty gritty to the philosophical; he
also offers next steps. I marveled at the solution of moving homeless
people into foreclosed homes, but that is a nitty-gritty, and others equally
brilliant must follow; but Danny takes a dangerous giant step: here is where we must borrow from history,
mixing the new with the old without losing ourselves in the process, perhaps
the toughest part of this nascent Revolution:
"Building this movement will require more outr eac h, and more alliances
with sympathetic organizations
in Labor, on campuses, and in the communit y . At
some point, they will have to enter into
coalitions despite f ears of co-optation.
Some spokespeople may have to emerge out of the leaderless environment with its commitment to consensus.
"[T] hey also need to champion and
understand r elat ed issues like demanding
the prosecution and incar cer a tion of financial criminals and fr audst ers."
"[T] he "us' in the movement is
far broader than those who ar e able to participate
in physical occupation. T he mo v e ment is everyone who sends supplies,
everyone w h o talks
to their friends and families about the underlying
issues, everyone who takes some form
of action to get involved in this civic process.
And farther than all of these people, the "us"
encompasses others we must reach:
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