Participation in the "Occupy" demonstrations that began in Wall Street against corporate greed and influence in polititics began here in Tallahassee on Friday and Saturday, 13 and 14 October 2011. Several hundred people, consisting mostly of the unemployed, retired and college students gathered with signs in front of the Old Capitol building on both days. Passing cars honked at the peaceful, but rather enthusiastic group with one sign clearly spelling out a simple message, "this is a sign". With similiar demonstration beginning now all over the world from Hong Kong to Berlin, is this movement, "a sign" of what is coming? In Florida, demostration with a few hundred people were gathered in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Pensecola, Orlando and Gainesville. Four people were arrested in the Gainesville demostration for trespassing. Is anyone on Wall Street or in the nation's capital in Washington, D.C. even noticing the movement and will it change anything? Does corporate CEO's, such as Bill Gates, and politicians really get the message that the other 99 percent of the population are protesting bail outs of banks and the rich one percent? This writer does not think so and all the movements will do is cause more frustrations and added costs in over time costs to police for crowd control and city workers who clean up after the mess demostrator leave in the streets.
The effort to protest against the government and the rich reminds this writer of growing up in the coal mining town in Pennsylvania where all the rich store owners lived on a street appropriately named "Diamond Avenue". The hard working poor coal miners would complain about those rich folks that started their business pushing carts down the street after the depression selling pots and pans to the coal miners wives at high prices. They never went in to mines to make a living and now owned half the town's big stores and coal companies that hired them. This writer recalls a day when his father, a coal miner, was driving down Diamond Avenue telling the story of how they got rich and that the Cox family owned the mines and paid the miners poor wages and this writer told his father, but this is what capitalism is all about. This writer's father, as almost all other miners believed, that the town's rich folks were crooks as to how they obtained their wealth. This was in 1945 and nothing has seemed to change as to how the haves and the have-nots think of each other. Why didn't the coal miners protest as they are doing today? Answer to that question is simple, the miners were too busy working to make a living for their families since there were no social benefits available to feed their families if they took time off like they do today.
The occupy demonstration were reported in the Tallahassee Democrat and in the same section of the Sunday paper was a report of another gathering of Tallahassee citizens at Tom Brown Park. This gatherning was to raise funds, and awareness, of heart disease and strokes. It was a 5K walk of some 2000 people, much more than the occupy group gathering, and it produced over $100K and certainly a more productive result. This power of the people event makes more sense than the one reported on above in front of the old capitol. The occupy movement is scary, in that according to Glenn Beck, it is funded and indorsed, by questionable backers to turn the United States into a socialistic governement. Several politicians are getting in the act, in Tallahassee, State Represntative Alan Williams, D, was ther and waved a sign supporting the event. Only time will tell how far this movement will go and what the end result will be. It is hoped that it will fizzel out with a new 2012 government leadership.
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