More video from the Occupy Wall Street mass-demonstration of civil disobedience on November 17th 2011.
In five days I will walk across a stage, my loving parents looking on, at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier, and collect a receipt for one education. What it cost me is time and money I never had. Where it will lead me I have no idea. The only thing I now know with absolute certainty is that authority is an imposed self-delusion that works both ways, our elites have been viciously sodomizing the Planet and the People almost non-stop since the end of the Second World War, and much like my favourite David Bowie record, our society is stuck in a rut we can’t get out of, skipping in place.
We keep making the same mistakes, the same lethal, inhuman and fundamentally flawed, idiotic mistakes. Mistakes regarding the environment, social and foreign policy, our economy, our infrastructure – the list is nearly endless, and what’s pathetic is that the most attention is paid to those who preach in double-speak and have convinced us of the quality of pseudo-intellectual criticality. They made it seem fun to doubt and question experts, and so, within a decade, we turned our backs on intellectual authority while signing away our freedom to those intent on using corporeal authority against those they were sworn to protect. And so here we are, weak, disorganized, incapable of seeing beyond our individual needs. A ‘society’ of John Galts is no society at all. Our innate focus on self-interest and self-preservation is so severe a mass of angry people can’t overpower police in riot gear. And it has been reinforced by subtle propaganda and infotainment for generations – we are nearly powerless to escape it. By the grace of the gods, however, everyone has a breaking point. If the slave-warriors of the corporate kleptocracy are given carte-blanche to continue using excessive force against peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights – whether in New York, Montréal, Shanghai or Durban – all it takes is a single galvanizing act, image, injustice. A burning man, a woman struck down, humiliated, veterans shot in the back – whatever it is, it will happen and it will shock us out of submission. All I can do is hope that such a shock is still possible.
With every passing day I see more criminals masquerading as protectors of our society. Our society, or whatever’s left of it, doesn’t seem worth a damn anymore. Maybe we still have a culture or set of values worth fighting for, something we can all relate to and is found buried deep inside all of us, buried in a mass subconscious we don’t understand. But for the moment we exist in a state of mass paralysis.
If the people of Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria can stand up to their oppressors, fight them, and win, why can’t we?
Yesterday thousands of Kuwaitis stormed their parliament.
And we offer ourselves like sheep to a slaughter, waiting for the baton to drop.
I can’t tell if it’s immensely brave or profoundly foolish.
My education can’t tell me that, for what it’s worth.
As of the time this article was published at 17h46 EST, an estimated five-thousand people had occupied Foley Square by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.
Stay strong.
