I'm fed up with people who lived through the Sixties as I did but ask plaintively why political activists don't flood the streets now as they did then.
They don't remember that when the first lunch counter sit-ins began in 1960, few of us thought that the mere handful of black college students participating would in the short space of three years grow into the quarter of a million people, black and white, who stood on the Capitol Mall listening to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. describe his dream of America.
They don't remember that when we first demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, we too were but a handful isolated from our peers and ridiculed by our elders for opposing our own country in a time of war. Again, it was only three years later that a half million of us, young and old, marched in New York and built an antiwar movement that would surpass in size and scope any popular American uprising since the Civil War.
And in not remembering, my peers forget that mass movements do not rise all at once but grow from kernels of activism. Most of those kernels die an early death, but a few, either because they are nurtured or overly repressed, attract more participants and gradually blossom into more powerful forces.
Now is the time for everyone desperate to remove our nation from the conservative era in which it is marooned to stop bemoaning the lack of activism and get down to Wall Street, or the local City Hall, to join the most promising kernel of activism that has come along in years -- a movement actually arguing to tax the rich, redistribute the wealth, and force the government toward populism. Haven't we waited decades to see this?
Yes, this movement is still in its infancy. And that's where it will die unless we put aside our cynicism and our skepticism and give the Wall Street activists the benefit of the doubt, just as we asked for it in vain from our elders when we first set out to do the impossible - build a mass movement of Americans against an American war in Vietnam.
Movements don't grow on predictable schedules. Their course is entirely unpredictable, chaotic, fraught with false starts and wrong turns, and of course, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, few of them make it past the numerous obstacles, natural and manmade, that are put in their path.
We veterans of the Sixties have become encrusted with doubt. I'm putting mine aside and going to Wall Street. This kernel of activism might spawn a powerful populist movement, and if it does, I want to help it along.
I went to my first antiwar demonstration only months after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was rammed through the Congress. There were only 40 of us carrying picket signs in front of a regional Dow Chemical facility in suburban Chicago. We were protesting their manufacture of napalm first being used to burn alive those Vietnamese villagers who supported the guerrillas fighting for their freedom and independence.
I was terribly disappointed at the miniscule turnout that day. I could not know then that within a few years hundreds of thousands of demonstrators would turn Dow and Honeywell into international pariahs for manufacturing the napalm, the anti-personnel cluster bombs, and the toxic Agent Orange used in the mass murder of untold Vietnamese civilians.
If my compatriots and I had allowed our disappointment at the turnout for that first demonstration to keep us from going to the next, the antiwar movement would have been stillborn. Instead, we kept at it until there were millions at our side building the antiwar movement into the powerful behemoth it became.
So I'm going to Wall Street. I'm not going to wait until this movement succeeds before I join it. I'm going to join it now and try to give it a chance to succeed. The young people on the street have said they look to the Arab Spring for inspiration. That's appropriate. Even their parents, for the most part, are too young to remember the Sixties.
Not me. I'm not going to Wall Street because of the Arab Spring. I'm going because I remember how the Sixties began, how none of us at the beginning could see over the horizon at the remarkable era that was soon to follow. What's happening in Wall Street is only a kernel today. What the rest of us do in response will determine if it becomes a movement tomorrow.
Bill Zimmerman is the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties, recently published by Doubleday. He is a partner in the political consulting firm, Zimmerman & Markman.
Mark Noll: Protestantism Today
THESE ARE THE WORDS OF THE 1% WHO WANT TO STOP THE MOVEMENT
DO NOT LET THEM DISSUADE YOU WITH THEIR TYPICAL NAMECALLING AND AD HOMINEMS.
That's right, and if you had any integrity you'd be protesting against them NOW too.
We have the government that Eisenhower warned us about, except it is no longer the military-industrial complex. Now we have the leviathan regulatory-banking-educational-warfare-crony capitalist complex. The left's standard answers are as tired as they are useless. More regulation is not the answer. The regulated always control the process. Politicians and bureaucrats are inevitably corrupted by the power they wield. We have to start pushing back. Dismantle the corrupt system connection by connection, power by power.
http://youtu.be/YrkHNO865ak
(Though I knock the established church in this video, it does not mean that there is not truth in the Bible. There is truth in all Clutures.)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Evolution-Number-Nine-by-Michael-Dewey-110215-430.html
http://youtu.be/cmepYdfrQKM
They've tripled the wealth of the rich while the poor got porrer since Nixon. And three years ago they crashed the world's economy, paid themselves bonuses, and are now asking the poor to pay higher taxes so they can get a tax cut (flat tax proposals).
If you don't see how they control much of anything, it's only because they control so much of everything that you stopped noticing, like a frog in a pot.
Thanks, Bill. It's very nice to hear these words, particularly given how so many people who are supposedly on our side have been doing nothing but criticizing us for doing this wrong without ever bothering to show up, help out and help move this further.
In August 2005 I spent time at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX because I wanted to know first hand whether we had the beginning of an Anti War movement and to support Cindy Sheehan's efforts. The press reported that hundreds of Bush supporters were expected to arrive in buses. When I arrived a newly established Camp Casey II expanded the area occupied by the Sheehan group. Across the road from Camp Casey I, I saw no more than 6 Bush supporters with misspelled signs. Meanwhile there were hundreds of organized war protestors under a huge tent, eating catered food brought in from Dallas. Months later I saw an aerial view of thousands of protestors surrounding the White House but never saw Network news programs giving the movement any serious attention. OWS already has monumental publicity and will grow.
I march in Berkeley , San Francisco, & Sacramento, was tear gassed and beating by Police Batons.
Any one remember the Alameda Blue Meanies?
I then enlisted in the US Army instead of being drafted!
I shortly went to the Republic of Viet Nam!
That is a story for another time.
OWS is and has the Spirit and the vibe of the great change is Possible and can happen!
The end of the Viet Nam war perpetuated the path we have been driven down.
It is only now that the children of those of us who were against and were for the Viet Nam war have awoken to a world were there is hope for real change, not a Plastic superficial Matrix!
OWS has what we lost 35 years ago the need to join together to be a real nation of fair, equable, and honorable laws and people!
Not the cannon fodder, indenture Servitude of the heartless overly greedy corrupted Multinational Corporations and Tainted governments .
OWS like all the other human movements happening now and springing up all over this Planet are trusting none of these Multinational Corporations or Tainted governments with their future!
"The Future is here, the People have arrived"
There is enough discontent to go around and the demands of Occupy Wall St. seem confusingly dispersed but the main point being made loud and clear is that the target is Wall St's skimming off too much of profits on the backs of investor's investments who're unemployed and needy. That greed is (has) destroyed hopes of achieving the American Dream for most.
TY for your efforts, the 60s lives again in the shouts and signs of the people!!
We are currently living in a plutocracy. The systemic corruption that has infiltrated our government may not be illegal, but it is certainly criminal. Corporate influence is a malignant tumor, and I believe it is time to operate.
I got conservative union members(2nd amendment) who have never voted to the left actually discovering collective bargaining rights were more important than any other difference between the two parties-----what in the world got into conservative corporations?
The American ppl are actually becoming aware of who holds the power---we the ppl are the power and these crimes and covert relationships between the private sector and govt is a complete fraud without the support of those being told to sacrifice---This lesser-evil political party has got to go and big business who has been threatening the working class may have made a big mistake..
The American awakening is happening---it's real!