Occupiers, it's time to leave Wall Street and move on to the next location. You've made a difference; it's time to make a change. Wall Street got the message, ripped it up and tossed it into their solid gold trash can.
It's time to occupy the halls of government before they turn into the corridors of an insane asylum and get taken over by the inmates. The opponents to the occupiers are already worming their way into local politics and governing bodies. This is a grassroots movement that craves to be mowed.
A front-page article in the February 4th edition of the New York Times began:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances -- efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights....
What!? Well, these paranoids can't be having a political effect. Oh, no? The Times story continues:
"It sounds a little on the weird side, but we've found we ignore it at our own peril," said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association's chapter in Virginia.
"The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding (my italics), 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global-warming is a hoax.
"In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called "the destructive and insidious nature" of Agenda 21...
Reading the article is like being on the receiving end of a one-two punch, as in (1) the crazies are really out in force, and (2) how are the crazies taking over our government? Who are these spineless officials buckling under the weight of insanity? Is there no credible opposition? Have voices of reason vanished with moderate Republicans? What first sounds totally absurd is actually totally frightening. Sustainable development has its basis, some Tea Partiers say, in "Communitarianism." Which is just another word for communism, right?
The Tea Party is a throwback to that era when folks believed there were Reds under their beds and the UN was planning an invasion of the body snatchers.
Communism is dead. But apparently the news has not yet reached members of the Tea Party. No matter where they live, anytime they open their windows, they can see Russia. This is downright Orwellian, if not somewhat Vonnegutian.
When he had a soapbox, Glenn Beck promoted the conspiracy theory that the UN plan is a means of instituting "centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth."
Beck:
Some people now have begun questioning and standing up to what, on the surface, seems like a harmless initiative just to save the environment. But it is not. Be awake. Spread the word... But once they put their fangs into our communities, they'll suck all the blood out of it, and we will not be able to survive.
Bloggers abound, sounding just like the 50-year-old ravings of the John Birch Society or the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove:
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six.... How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
The American Thinker blog called the "sustainability agenda... an amalgamation of socialism and extreme environmentalism brushed with anti-American, anti-capitalist overtones."
My God, if we're not reduced to zombies first, we'll be doomed to become -- Europeans! Well, at least our teeth will have strong enamel and our bikes will sustain us better than our gas guzzlers.
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So, occupiers, you're needed to stop the mad chatters of the Tea Party. Get out to those town meetings, city council hearings and selectmen sessions and stop the freaks from inheriting the earth, stop their insanity from becoming policy!
At best, such poorly or rashly-formed opinions smack if not of ignorance then at least adolescence. Or to quote Vonnegut: "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
And so it goes.