Why I’m an Occupier

November 19, 2011

First, a caveat: I’m not a protestor. I haven’t been to the Occupy San Diego protests. I’ve never been inclined to protest. I don’t have the capacity for it. Perhaps it’s an attention span issue. I hope this doesn’t undermine what I have to say here.

It’s a moral issue. The best label I’ve found for my moral beliefs is “agnostic Mormonism” and I’ve recently been fond of calling myself a “liberaltarian” to describe my politics. Having grown up Mormon and having been a Mormon missionary for two years, my morality is informed heavily by Christ’s teachings. I love Jesus’s humanitarianism. It’s this humanitarianism that makes me sympathetic to the occupy movement, particularly after this past week.

On Thursday in Portland, Oregon, a 20 year old girl is pepper sprayed directly in the face from what looks like about two feet.

On Thursday in New York City, retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis is arrested. From a story preceding his arrest:

Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale “a farce.”

“They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lewis said.

Yesterday, UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike pepper sprays a group of students protesting on campus. Watch the video of this one.

The video is what pushed me over the edge. Seeing a man clad in boots and a helmet spray a group of students sitting on the ground (twice!) as if he were watering a garden, is too much for me. I’m an alum of the University of California. I can’t believe this happened in my country, in my state, at my university.

That the occupy movements lack definition is a feature, not a bug. Because occupy has no centralized leader or mission, everyone is allowed to project their own meaning onto it. I’ve seen occupy as a manifestation of anxiety over the influence of organizations in our lives. I believe it’s the same anxiety felt by people who identify with the Tea Party (which I found repulsive, probably based on my own classism).

Here’s what I see happening:

Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:

Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, this week’s violence made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are literally forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.

Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they care for individual liberties, is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”

Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?

There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.

I don’t know what to do, but I will not give another dollar to the UC system until Lt. John Pike is fired and stripped of all severance pay. I will not donate to any elected official currently holding office or any major political party. I’ll have to think of some other things to do.

Wake up.

If you liked this (you should have), you might also like:

Short link to this post:

http://evil-klown.blogspot.com wombat247

I liked this a lot more before you told me I should have liked it. Nevertheless, I’m going to blog about it because I think you had some worthwhile things to say that I wish more people were saying.
http://www.facebook.com/jefferyfoster Jeff Foster

Great post, Jed.
http://jedsundwall.com/ Jed Sundwall

Thanks Wombat! And sorry to be so needy about being liked. I read your blog post about it and I really appreciate it. I’m glad this conversation is expanding.
Anonymous

I woke up only a few days ago and I’m still in the struggling with what to do phase. The two things I’ve come up with that seem clearly positive are:

a) Protest. However, near as I can tell, in the modern day and age, one does not chant on the streets but rather on twitter, on blogs, and by performing google searches. These are the places that provide trending data readily and the traffic there makes it impossible to say “It’s just a few lazy kids.” Actually, given your career field, you probably know a great deal more than I do about this.

b) Take back your money.
Let’s try to remember that the money “wall street” is using to steal from us and pepper spray our children is OUR money that we gave them. Withdraw it. Put it in a local bank or credit union. Not only does that help to de-fang “wall street” but as it turns out, you pay lower fees, get better service, experience higher customer satisfaction, and potentially even better interest returns.

I’m avidly googling to find more. Honestly, while I am deeply appreciative of the sacrifices the on-site protesters are making, my sense is that for the masses, things like what I wrote above have a lot more impact. I think the purpose of the protesters is limited pretty much to getting folks like you and I to wake up. Apparently, for the two of us, they have succeeded.

Why I occupy: http://goo.gl/saZHN
Concerned citizen

It’s the Out of Control Government stupid!

Everything that is happening now is a battle between those who seek to control
people and vital resources and money by selling the “entitlement”
scam to the dis-informed and

those who believe that each and every individual
is entitled to self-determination, exercising free will decisions in a civil
and responsible manner.
Control can only be forced through Government regulation.

Everything that is going on now is an effort by the “Globalists” to
destroy the American middle class – ESPECIALLY the Private Sector lower-middle
class workers -(the government union workers force us to pay for their lavish, GAURANTEED pension and full medical/dental for life on the county/state/federal levels by taxing us to death and then the feds refuse to keep our social security savings separate from the general federal budget and steal from it!
It’s been the strength of the middle class that has kept
the power mongers in check and made America strong and a Beacon for
oppressed peoples elsewhere. These globalists only want 2 classes – the
government RULING CLASS and the peasant workers. The RULING class – the
Nancy Pelosi type have nothing but contempt for the average Joe – because they
all think we are fat, dumb, and addicted to some type of dependency (name your
personal choice!)

And the Dis- information news media repeats the same lies over and over until
you believe them – they laugh at this! But they know it works
because you keep voting in the smooth talking liars because you make your
decisions on who is the best talker – the best salesman who can keep the lie
going. The media says the Democrats are the party for the people and the
downtrodden but they are all so filthy rich – so why don’t you start asking
them for handouts?
The Democrats have been selling lies for YEARS – every since Pres. Lyndon
Johnson proclaimed the “Great Society” 50 years ago. The only
Great Society there is now? It’s within the DC Beltway ! Screw everybody
else but sweet talk them.

What’s the answer? The answer is INSIDE YOU. You have to believe in
the TRUTH, the WISDOM within. Nurture your inner Moral strength and
Disciplined Responsibly for your own actions! Are these not the nuggets
that supported Golden Ages of the past? And start studying history! Start
reading how the German people (on the extreme right)and the Russian
people (on the extreme left) were duped in believing that answers were outside
of themselves and fell under the control of a tyrannical ruling class.
You are being duped now in to a new tyranny.
Start reading about those who were strong and decent and promoted a caring,
vigorous, and prosperous civilization. And read the Constitution!
The authors were brilliant in laying out the plan to establish and maintain a
such a civilization – stop letting the foolish media types leading you
astray – you must become EMPOWERED from within instead of entitled (and
therefore CONTROLLED) from without!