Stay with me for a minute: it will be a circuitous route to get there, but this is leading up to a rip snorting account of the Occupy Omaha rally October 15th.
Somehow, the Tea Party of Nebraska scheduled a rally at the same time and in the same place as Occupy Omaha. What a coincidence!
The World Herald said that Occupy Omaha may have drawn as many as 1,000 people. My own count wasn’t that high, but there were at least 200, maybe as many as 500. They were hard to count. . They were moving a lot.
I’m a little more sure of the Tea Party estimate. I counted 8 people at one point. There may have been as many as 20. I was moving around a lot.
I asked the coordinator of the Tea Party rally (Tea Party Patriots, officially), Julie Fredrickson, is she was familiar with the Boston Tea Party.
She laughed. “That was hundreds of years ago,” she said. So I asked again. “That was hundreds of years ago,” she said. So, I asked again. This time she answered that the modern movement is not the Tea Party: it’s the “Taxed Enough Already” Party. So I asked if she was surprised people actually associated “Tea Party” with the Boston Tea Party, and whether they didn’t actually intend that association. She answered: “I didn’t name it.”
(There were witnesses to that conversation, by the way; I’m not coloring it or embellishing in any way.)
She was right that it happened hundreds of years ago: December of 1773. And perhaps she didn’t want to admit the irony playing out in front of her on the plaza of the City-County Building. For irony there was, at least for the current Tea Party, pointing signs at the Occupy crowd saying such things as Capitalism works if you do”.; “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you”.
The Boston Tea Party was a rather cantankerous mob protesting government collusion with corporate interests to prop up corporate profits at the expense of the common people. They occupied a corporate “branch”, you might say – the Dartmouth, a ship of the East India Company. They also, of course, looted and destroyed the private property (tea!) on board.
Which brings us to Occupy Omaha, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Kearney and the global movement to protest government collusion with corporate interests to prop up corporate profits at the expense of the common people. (Dear Tea Party: That’s the irony, I case you missed it).
By a little before the scheduled 9:00 starting time, there were already at least 100 people gathered at the Plaza.
Most marchers were not kids, but not yet middle aged, clean cut and smiling. The crowd grew almost imperceptibly, fanning out, climbing the wing sculpture, sitting on the steps – until a guy showed up with what he called a “buffalo drum” and the cadences and chanting began – “We. Are. The 99 percent!” and “The people/united/will never be defeated” -- and it was suddenly apparent it had grown to hundreds. The crowd was mostly white with a sprinkling of African Americans, folks old enough to have demonstrated in the Sixties, hippies and “new” hippies, business owners, families with their kids, disabled, some poor – and mainly, by far, currently employed.
State legislator and congressional candidate Gwen Howard was there. “These are my kind of people,” she said. She hung out near the back of the crowd, though, obviously not involved in organizing the event or leading it in any way. I looked for the leader, the organizer. No one could tell me who it might be.
And there’s the strength of the Occupy movement, and the problem it presents for those trying to denigrate it. The Occupy movement is truly organic; it can’t be put into a demographic because it’s everybody; the leaders’ motives can’t be impugned because there are no leaders in any traditional sense.
It’s power is its universality, its undeniability: the system has evolved -- or maybe devolved is a better word; over the years, capitalism’s focus has altered so that, rather than giving everyone a chance, it reserves “chances” for very few. But everyone outside the few are in pretty much the same boat. You can’t obfuscate because everyone sees the truth in their own lives; you can’t impugn that guy’s credibility because what is true of him is true of the rest of us.
Sure, the more successful among us have earned it. No one denies that. But the message of Occupy Wall Street is that people have noticed the difference between “earn” and “take”.
“It’s like our values have been turned upside down,” one woman said. Brett Anderson, carrying a sign that said “They only call it class warfare when we fight back”, said his father worked for one company for 20 years “and then a new company bought the business and cut his pay. I always thought the American Dream was if you work hard you can make it. But. . .”
Earn and Take – different things. At an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, reporters found that workers were moving heavy packages with indoor temperatures over 100, and conditions were so bad the employer had an ambulance regularly standing by. Why not just improve the working conditions? “But with job openings scarce, Amazon and Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temporary employment firm that is hiring workers for Amazon, have found eager applicants in the swollen ranks of the unemployed.” If a worker complains or quits, a new one is there immediately. In other words, workers are treated badly because the employer can treat the workers badly.
No one denies the warehouse owner earned the warehouse; but what’s happening is that workers’ health and dignity are being taken. Similarly, no one denies the executives of the bank earned their positions; but when they raise your credit card interest by 10 points overnight, they are taking, not earning. Or maybe you earned ownership of an oil company; when you raise gas prices exorbitantly every Memorial Day weekend, you are taking from us.
One man at Occupy Omaha carried a this sign: “I am the 1 percent”. He said he didn’t have to work, had inherited well and invested wisely. What was he doing there? “The influence we wealthy have with legislators is just too much. It’s basically been corrupted so that it’s purpose is to make the rich richer.” (No, his name isn’t Warren; it’s Lee).
In other words, in his view, the system has gone beyond earning; it’s now geared to enhance taking.
But Occupy Omaha showed that this is no longer a secret. You know the story of the chained elephant: the elephant doesn’t realize it’s chained, thinks that the length of the chain is simply as far as he can go, so that’s as far as he ever goes, even when the chain is removed.
Well, people are starting to realize they’ve been chained, and they’ve taken the chain off. They may not know where they’re going yet, but they know they can go further than where the system has told them they can.
They want to find the American dream they were led to believe in. That’s all. It’s nothing to fear, unless you don’t want them to have it.
The actual march began somewhat after 9:00, up Farnam to 24th Street, then around downtown, and then back to the Federal Reserve at about 22nd and Farnam. Traffic lights were obeyed. A few people carried garbage sacks to dispose of any littler. It was peaceful every step of the way.
Name that tune: “You know it’s gonna be all right.” Really.
(For more, concise analysis of the national phenomena, see what Robert Reich and Paul Krugman have to say)
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