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Metropolitan Museum of Art - Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion. Photo: WallyG on flickr
From Ground Zero To Zero Tolerance
Slowly, very slowly, the mainstream media is getting it. Possibly a result of remembering that reporters get stories by leaving the office and engaging with the subjects of their pieces, I’ve started to see some posts today that more closely resemble accurate analyses of Occupy Wall Street. It’s not that OWS actually cares much about how they’re being portrayed by corporate controlled media organizations that the protesters consider as much a part of the problem as the banks or corporations. One does have to wonder though what in hell is going through the heads of the NY Times’ editorial board, as the paper considered by most people to be the bastion of the liberal press continues to present a somewhat condescending and cynical view of the protest. But OWS doesn’t care because they don’t have to care, they have their own media, with an audience of newly passionate Americans who will have no trouble with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a label for this movement.
Whereas on the surface this protest is about the occupation itself, camping out on a cold Manhattan sidewalk is hardly the goal of a group of smart, dedicated, and committed people. Occupy Wall Street is an ever evolving series of political discussions building towards the discovery of innovative solutions that will Occupy the consciousness of distressed and disaffected Americans across the politcal and social spectrum. In a televised interview with Rev. Al Sharpton today on MSNBC, Harrison Schultz, one of the movement’s originators who is fully employed and also going for his PhD in sociology, put it best: “This is a conversation. We’re talking about revolution, not about reform”. This kind of out of the box thinking makes it nearly impossible for the entrenched media to translate into the packaged soundbites they’re used to serving up to a public deprived of its span of attention. Occupy Wall Street isn’t interested in who’s running for President, what the current capital gains tax rate is, or how big a deficit problem we have, but it’s not because they’re dumb or ill-informed. Instead of directly confronting the monolithic and monstrous machine created by the marriage of commerce and politics, the protesters are only interested in planting the seeds to grow a new system, with a level playing field for all, a system in which people are united in their dedication to preserving the common good, where corporate profits take a back seat to those good old inalienable rights.
Noah Kass, a therapist, blogger for The Street.com, and a weekly guest on the Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC, just tweeted me this: “ change does not happen overnight, but when it does look out…compassion and passion working together.” Perhaps Noah hit on the one word that’s been missing from all the attempted media analysis, and the one word that you can sense inside the statements of anyone currently occupying Liberty Park: compassion. I found it extremely compelling to absorb the fact that this protest is taking place literally across the street from ground zero, the site of the worst tragedy in American history. The transformation of that much destruction into so much unified creative energy and goodwill is astounding to contemplate. This can only happen when a country consciously casts its fears aside and remembers that our common purpose is to care for one another. We’re taking the first steps in rediscovering that compassion and Occupy Wall Street, in its own anarchic way, is creating a new process in which we can apply it.
31 Comments
Thanks, Lucky!
“We’re talking about revolution, not about reform.”
Do traditional media have any ability to process this? We shall see.
Rec’d
ya know, it’s really interesting to watch these pro journalists fumble all over themselves trying to figure this out. It’s not like I would assume these reporters are stupid, but they seem to be unable to break from their frame of reference, or even just trust their own ears. Once you go down there and spend some time, it’s relatively easy to catch the drift of what’s going on, and like Schultz said, it’s just a conversation, people getting to know their new partners in evolution. It may be that the journos are just so used to cynically overanalyzing issues that they can’t see the forest for the trees.
This occupation is vexing to a lot of liberal/left/progressive activists, too. Eventually they will get it.
Great post! Thanks!
Nice post, and not to quibble, but between six and seven hundred thousand were killed in the Civil War; pretty freaking tragic, IMO.
Approaching 3000 died at Pearl Harbor.
Just sayin’.
“their new partners in evolution” — terrific concept!
point well taken Wendy, but I was a block from the WTC on 9/11, it’s always going to resonate more with me.
“This is a conversation. We’re talking about revolution, not about reform”.
That’s it in a nut shell. The oligarchs and their political whores won’t even discuss reform. So the people are forced to take matters into their own hands.
Yesterday the assertion was that the mainstream media is controlled and the Corporations will not let us learn about ‘Occupy Wall Street’. Now it is a different story.
So which is it?
I think this is another really exciting part of all this. Due to Livestream, youtube, etc. we can shape our own message for our own audience, for our own purposes.
No more begging to get on “Meet the Republicans” with Gregory to get our voices heard.
There is a lot of potential here.
Nothing about Pearl Harbor is analogous to this. The Civil War definitely may be. But, as John Quincy Adams said in his summation to the Supreme Court in the Amadeus appeal, “If this decision brings on a civil war to address the evil left unaddressed by our Founders, so be it.”
It didn’t, at least not right away. There did come a time when the nation could simply not tolerate slavery, or at least the expansion of slavery, any more. And the slave power started the war, not Abraham Lincoln or the free states. The states of the Confederacy had a choice, and chose badly. Then again, only white men could vote for or against secession, and it is important to remember that in several of the Confederate states the vote was VERY close.
The time is rapidly approaching when all of us must choose whether to accept serfdom, to fight it, or to fight for a New Feudalism. It is really up to our current slave power, the corporatists themselves, whether or not the transition to Something Better Than This Unacceptable Bullshit is peaceful or not.
Both, in a way. The Corporations(your capitalization, not mine) did not WANT us to learn about OWS, so they ignored it for as long as they could, just like they did Tunisia and Egypt. But the story kept coming out on the Internets(some Bushisms I like), and there were just too many people out there on the streets to ignore, so they HAD to report SOMETHING.
NPR was the first. I don’t know about PBS. The foreign media had picked it up. Capitalism itself drove them to report on the anti-capitalist movement in the United States. So the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, CNN, and others first reported only on the arrests: all’s well, we’re in control.
But the protests just kept going and growing. So, sensing profits from breaking in-depth coverage first, or maybe even by some latent journalistic impulse, a few major media networks actually starting publishing INTERVIEWS with some protesters.
It is taking off from there. It’s a BIG story. And getting bigger by the day.
Your question is a false one.
Interesting idea, compassion as a projection of OWS. Then we should shift to the more modern and older spelling Avalokitashvara. While everyone can see the difficulty the press is having characterizing OWS, it’s a little more subtle to see the difficulty the supporters are having. But as long as it continues to stay the way it is, it will have a certain fractal quality, with people projecting onto it what they are looking to find in a rebirth, and compassion is a good word, from the bodhisattva’s point of view — the one who listens to the sounds of the world — hence the ‘a’. Compassion should be infinitely faceted.
Well I’m indeed happy to see momentum growing against the capitalist pigs.
As expected, the feudal lords aren’t giving up that easily. Having failed at attempting to define and marginalizing this movement, I heard a strategy today. Here in San Diego, the local AM wingnut on the AM wasteland here, Rick Roberts, went after the issue of poverty. He had some gal from the Heritage Foundation making the argument that people in poverty in the US aren’t in poverty. They should stop complaining if they can watch a flat screen or twitter people.
Given their worldview this makes complete sense. Instead of inspiring to an even greater society, they want to drive everything (except their bottom line) down to the bottom. Make this a 3rd world country too, where they have opened their businesses. The peasant class here really needs to be a 3rd world peasant class.
So here comes the pushback from our feudal lords. The 90 odd percent of us serfs though aren’t afraid, are we!
edit:
Well I’m indeed happy to see momentum growing against the capitalist pigs.
As expected, the feudal lords aren’t giving up that easily. Having failed at attempting to define and marginalizing this movement, I heard a strategy today. Here in San Diego, the local AM wingnut on the AM wasteland here, Rick Roberts, went after the issue of poverty. He had some gal from the Heritage Foundation making the argument that people in poverty in the US aren’t in poverty. They should stop complaining if they can watch a flat screen or twitter people.
Given their worldview this makes complete sense. Instead of aspiring to an even greater society, they want to drive everything (except their bottom line) down to the bottom. Make this a 3rd world country too, where they have opened their businesses. The peasant class here really needs to be a 3rd world peasant class.
So here comes the pushback from our feudal lords. The 90 odd percent of us serfs though aren’t afraid, are we!
Thank you for two important posts, LUCKYMW. I very much hope you will be able to keep us informed now that Kevin has moved on to Washington, with respect to the dialogue in New York as it unfolds.
As others have remarked on Kevin’s blog, it is not only the corporate media which is having trouble coming to grips with the movement, but I have also been following the radio ‘left’ and certainly they also have their difficulties, a sort of resentment seems to creep through in the midst of their praise, so I am glad to read of the independence of messaging your essays and the ongoing other ‘feeds’ Occupy Wall Street is doing.
Your comment on Ground Zero is totally appropriate as I think the awful shock of that apart from the huge loss of life and destruction was how innocents went unknowingly to their deaths at that place – unknowing because before it happened they could not have dreamed anyone would be so bestial as to turn ordinary people into a weapon of death. It still is hard to comprehend, all these years later.
Be ye nonetheless as wise as serpents at the same time as innocent, as gentle, as lambs. My prayers will be ongoing for the safety of all Occupiers, wherever they be.
Well Mitt Romney is freaked about OWS
Fractal contribution — what a phenomenal concept, beautiful post thanks.
OWS is organically enigmatic, mostly because it’s nothing but a conversation we’re all now willing to have, and with so many voices in the mix it will be difficult to pigeonhole it into a convenient political niche. Ground Zero used to be my neighborhood, I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in Zuccotti Park prior to the Occupation, I think it’s somewhat transcendent that a relatively small park has been transformed into Ground Zero for a new democracy.
While the jury is still out on OWS, people rarely understand or even notice historical shifts as they take place; it is said that at the end of the day the Bastille fell; Louis XVI wrote in his diary, “Nothing happened.”
Revolutions of belief (and I think THAT’S what the OWS “conversation” is really about) are even more difficult to pin, because they take place within human minds. This is what members of the more staid left fail to realize. You don’t always know what’s going on, even when it is your own mind that is the scene of the shift.
Thanks for posting and articulating the qualitative feel of the movement.
I too lived near the WTC (and 5-minute walk) and was home on 9/11 and what the PTBs did in the name of what transpired that day was/ is abhorrent.
False dilemmas. It’s either they hate us or they don’t. Uh, maybe their attitudes are contradictory or something?
How dare they fight back?
I’ll not argue the merits of that argument, but it’s clear to me that the Civil War was fought over far more than slavery. And it’s made clear to me in countless discussions I’ve both witnessed and partaken in on the boards at various websites over the years: nothing I could say about the history will convince you.
Pace, Gringo. ;o)
Yeah, it IS kind of hard to convince the great-great grandson of Confederate veterans that the most important issue of the Civil War was NOT about slavery, when that scion of slaveowners believes such is so.
Maybe we can discuss that topic elsewhere, somewhere and sometime. Preferably over intoxicating substances and good eats.
I think you meant “Peace,” not “Pace,” which does make a decent Picante sauce. But I was raised in San Antonio, so forgive me for not resisting temptation.
Who are “they”? I don’t know who you mean. Honestly. The media? If so, for many the answer is “neither.” They are just looking for a story that sells. They are capitalists, you know. The only morality is profit, here and now.
No my question is not false. It is hypocritical to claim that the media is controlled then back off that claim when the media does not follow suit with the original claim. It would make the most sense to restrict access at this point of the game. Instead we get more coverage? That is some piss ass media control.
The media has been telling us that the protest existed from the very beginning. The media did not make the protest front and center for the fact that it was not that interesting.
Romney’s scared. He should be. Shows rationality, common sense, all that, from his perspective. Aristo-Kleptocrats like him may even try to cut a deal. Beware of proffered deals.
Where’s Obama? Has the President said anything about this? All I hear from that direction is crickets. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LIKE crickets, but really!
Louis XVI went on a hunt on July 14, 1789, and missed. So, nothing happened. To be fair, he probably really knew nothing about the events in Paris dozens of miles away from Versailles.
But, didn’t Obama insist on keeping his Blackberry? He doesn’t have the same technological excuse ol’ Louis did, now does he?
I meant Pace; too lazy to add the html tags; thought you just might get it.
Pace Picante sucks, IMO; and belief does not make something so, no matter what your relatives believe that you believe…la la la. I will say I learned a lot I didn’t know on the subject, but I’m not qualified to bring the points well. If I do run into any of the links to the blogs of those discussions, I’ll get one or two to you.
I will also add that as far as ‘greatest tragedies on American soil’ or whatever the expression was, the genocide of millions of First Americans takes that prize, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of that first.
Meanwhile, I’ll have a beer with you, or a few shots of tequila…any old time. ;o) ‘New Jersey????’
This an excellent piece on OWS, one of the best I’ve read.
“Occupy Wall Street isn’t interested in who’s running for President, what the current capital gains tax rate is, or how big a deficit problem we have, but it’s not because they’re dumb or ill-informed. Instead of directly confronting the monolithic and monstrous machine created by the marriage of commerce and politics, the protesters are only interested in planting the seeds to grow a new system, with a level playing field for all, a system in which people are united in their dedication to preserving the common good, where corporate profits take a back seat to those good old inalienable rights.”
This sums it all up about as well as I’ve seen it done.
Well thanks to all for your eloquent and constructive comments. I have been vastly inspired by this movement. During the Bush years I kept asking “Where’s the outrage”, and I think we’ve finally begun to see it. As of today I’m beginning to find humor in some of the media’s attempts to explain or rationalize this movement, but I have to point a finger directly at both CNN and the NY Times for what now seems to be a purposeful attempt at marginalizing OWS as something to condescend to. The editorial boards at both of these entities don’t qualify as stupid enough not to understand or at the very least take seriously this movement. The hell with them. I will continue to blog about OWS, and my next piece will address the tough question of how exactly OWS can effectively create a new democracy without becoming a part of the old one. Of the many traps on the road ahead, I find that one to be the most difficult to negotiate. If you have any ideas or comments on that topic, please feel free to contribute. Thanks again for your kind words and also for holding me accountable for my ideas.
Bodhisattvas unite .