Tag Archives: Occupy Wall Street

October 15, 2011 · 5:12 pm

Occupying Earth

A couple of thoughts for the day on the Occupy Wall Street protests: first, I love this picture.  At first, I thought it was a bit of a joke.  At first, I even considered the

We Are Everywhere

possibility that it was meant as satire.  But, no, that looks like a very sincere hippie type person with his dogs, in a very remote setting.  Sarah Palin has given Alaska a bit of a bad name, but I was a big fan of Northern Exposure, and I’m sure there are plenty of mellow, nature loving, live and let live Alaskans up there.  The other thing about this picture was it made me think about the meaning of the word “occupy” and, by extension, the meaning of the movement.  More on that in a few paragraphs.

I watched a couple of old episodes of Deep Space Nine this morning.  Normally, the time travel episodes irritate me.  Too many cheap laughs at easy cultural references.  I am a serious Star Trek fan, and I like my Star Trek serious.  Anyway, this was a two-parter and I hadn’t seen it before and it really caught my attention.

Captain Cisco, Dr. Bashir and Jadzia Dax accidentally get beamed down to San Francisco in 2024.  It was a bit of a nightmare world.  Cisco and Bashir immediately got picked up by the police for not having ID, and incarcerated in a “sanctuary” which was basically a concentration camp for unemployed people.  Cisco looked at a clock on the wall and realized the significance of the date – two days before the famous-in-the-future Bell Riots, which would spark the revolution which would lead to their modern utopia.

The thing that struck me was the amazing parallels with the OWS movement.  Sure, there was quite a bit more drama and violence, but the main issues were unemployment, lack of housing, and wealth disparity gone wild.  The people in the sanctuary used the internet to get their message out, and the authorities tried to block the message.  Also, some of the cops were decent working guys but there was one who strongly resembled NYPD officer Tony Bologna.

All in all, pretty prescient for 1995.

Now, back to the photo.

That man truly is occupying his space.  Through the miracle of the internet, he is reminding us all that everybody occupies the space they actually occupy.  A few years back R.E.M. had a song “Stand in the Place Where You Live,” which pretty much expressed the same thought.

The rich fuckers may have all the money, but we still all live on this planet and we are not going to go away.  Sooner or later, they’re going to have to deal with us.  That’s what “occupy” means to me.

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September 25, 2011 · 7:08 pm

Facebook Defeats MSM!

For the past couple of years, my internet consumption has been divided into roughly 3 parts.  I get most of my news from the Huffington Post.  Sure, I follow links from there to other places, but they’re fairly comprehensive.  They keep me up to date on celebrity gossip and the major

New York's Arab Spring

news items of the day – or so I thought.  I go to Wonkette for entertainment.  Seriously.  They are way, way funnier than the Onion or Cracked.com, although I sometimes check them out, too.  And, of course, Facebook, which my friend Jim Freeman once described as “the gift that keeps on taking.”  I mock it, I criticize it, but I’ve got to admit I love it.

The Huffington Post, of course, is an online newspaper, which gives them several advantages over the print media.  They can update as fast as a story breaks.  They’ve got no space limitations.  And they are still evolving.  Unfortunately, they seem to view themselves as part of the mainstream media, the status quo.

And so, despite the fact that the “Occupy Wall Street” protests have been going on in New York for a week, I just learned about them this morning on Facebook.  Wonkette may have had something, but I’m not really looking for news there.  After finding out about them on Facebook, about how harmless women who were already confined behind a police barricade and clearly unarmed and not even slightly dangerous, were suddenly and without any real provocation pepper sprayed; about how a man was brutally thrown to the ground and handcuffed for writing the word “Love” on the sidewalk -in chalk; about how a group of well dressed 21st century Marie Antoinettes stood on their balconies and drank champagne, laughing at the plight of the unemployed, the uninsured, the homeless, the American desperate class; I went looking for the story on Huffington Post and I did find it, buried well below Herman Cain’s straw poll win in Florida, a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a couple of things about taxes, an article on some mass graves in Libya, a dog eating festival in Asia, a piece by Alec Baldwin on why he didn’t attend the Emmy Awards Ceremony,  and many other stories.

But everything they had, I’d already seen on Facebook.  It seems the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover these protests, and the Huffington Post views itself as part of the mainstream media.

So, I guess we will just have to carry on informing each other.  If the mainstream media withers on the vine and eventually dies, it will be their own fault.  Report the news or GTFO.

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