Caption: Protesters at an Occupy Charlotte rally, Oct. 1st, 2011. All photos courtesy of Grant Baldwin.Mr. Baldwin also was a tremendous help in providing much-needed information for this article.
By Cliff Montgomery – Oct. 17th, 2011
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
– Franz Kafka
The pro-democracy movement which began as “Occupy Wall Street” in New York City has spread like wildfire across a parched land.
In just one month, “hundreds of thousands of people” now are “rallying around the world and numerous encampments [are] springing up in cities large and small,” an Associated Press article declared today.
Occupations can be found in a host of U.S. cities, such as Washington, DC, Burlington, VT, Chicago, IL, Cincinnati, OH, Rapid City, SD and Fairbanks, Alaska.
An occupation in one U.S. city may prove to be especially interesting. The occupation of Charlotte, NC has planted its banner in the shadow of Bank of America (BoA) corporate headquarters.
Caption: Occupy Charlotte protesters before Bank of America corporate headquarters, Oct. 8/9, 2011.
Along with JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, BoA is one of the most massive of the Big Banks.
And “thanks largely to its 2009 acquisition of Merrill Lynch,” declares Hoover’s, a top online business analysis service, “Bank of America is also one of the world’s leading wealth managers with more than $2 trillion under management.”
But while the worldwide Occupation movement may see BoA as Charlotte’s poster child for all that’s wrong with our current social structure, “Bank of America is really just one basic problem,” said Tom Shope, one of Occupy Charlotte’s coordinators.
Shope also was instrumental in getting this occupation started–a tough feat in an area frankly not known for massive, genuinely democratic protests.
Shope declared what he saw as the fundamental purpose of the Occupation movement.
“The power structure we have now is simply a rule of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. But the 99% of people in America and around the world have no real say over their own lives. That just has to end,” said Shope.
“If the Occupation movement can get people to remember and recognize their own basic human freedoms, then we can say we’ve done our job,” he added.
Others at the Charlotte Occupation stated much the same thing.
“The system is fundamentally broken. I have to admit, there’s one thing we at these occupations share with the people who make up the Tea Party: We know the people at the top ignore us. It’s just time to take back our country and our society,” said Eric McManus, one of the many who attended an Occupy Charlotte protest march on Bank of America Saturday.
“It’s time we stopped the constant corporate and financial abuses going on in our system. It’s time for a change,” said another protester who declined to give his name.
“I won’t be an Economic Slave,” declares one apparent father/daughter team. Protest at Bank of America headquarters, Oct. 8/9, 2011.
These notions are held by nearly everyone at the occupation in Charlotte, and they appear to be the same basic ideas held at every other occupation, from Wall Street to Rome.
If some in the corporate media would spend less time judging the occupation protesters–and more time simply listening to them–they would discover this truth as well.
At times the occupations may hit a note of discord, or even one or two notes of the absurd–but they are just as likely to hit an occasional pitch of pure beauty. The movement is young, raw and a genuine direct democracy in action.
Those who have all of the money but do none of the work like to shower the protesters with a heap of empty name-calling and abuse.
What‘s often not mentioned is the reason for all that abuse. Those at the top of America’s economic pyramid scheme are afraid.
They should be.
Working people in America and around the world are choosing to change themselves. Gone are the passive consumers who submissively play the powerless, sedated role laid out for them by their self-appointed ‘guardians’.
The 99% are swiftly becoming active citizens who realize that this world, their countries and even their own lives belong to them.
They’re beginning to realize that freedom is not something that is created by putting a few scribbles on a piece of dead parchment. Nor is freedom something that is created by business people in three-piece suits. Freedom cannot be sold, it cannot be consumed.
They also understand that no one can ‘defend’, ‘protect’ or ‘preserve’ their freedom for them. Freedom is not a passive act.
No one can predict what will become of the Occupation movement. But it may already have scored its most sweeping victory. Through this movement, the people have re-discovered their faith in themselves.
That alone marks the Occupation movement as the beginning of a brave new era for our tired world. And it is right on time.
