Tipping point.
For a very long time, years in fact, I resisted and resisted the notion held by many doomsayers that the entire "system" (the sum total of all the public and private sector institutions and military making up this country) is completely rotten to the core and cannot be recovered solely by working inside that system. I had rejected the idea that the system is so far gone that there is no chance of recovery without a complete reboot, a revolution of some form, peaceful or otherwise.
I've always believed that one should work within the system BEFORE one decides to act outside it, if one is going to act outside it at all. I still actually believe that. I believe that trying to influence our "system" from inside it is something that we must continue to do, futile as it may seem.
I also don't buy the line that both major parties are "exactly the same." What I DO buy is that the only difference between them is in how the crumbs on the cake are distributed. I believe they both represent a status quo that is entirely bankrupt and cannot be fixed from within -- though we should keep trying.
This country -- no, this "system," is a failure. It's rotten to the very core.
Only the seeds remain pristine, buried at the very center of the rot. The seeds are the Constitution, its Amendments, and perhaps most important, the Bill of Rights.
The seeds are ideas.
The seeds are an expression of our rights as clear-eyed, active, engaged citizens of a Republic. This, for me, is the American Dream.
The American Dream is not the infinitely repeated variations of "go to school, pay your bills, work hard, get a little house with a little dog and a little family, go to the doctor when you're sick, get bread to eat when you can't find work, have a little money to pass to your kids when you die." For me the American Dream is the dignity given to us as human beings by those ideas in our Constitution, the Amendments, and that glorious Bill of Rights. Those ideas unite us and they make that more mundane dream, and many many other dreams, POSSIBLE.
The essence of my American Dream isn't about stuff. It's about freedom afforded us by those ideas. Freedom to express. Freedom to assemble. Freedom to create. Freedom to not toe the line. The American Dream is freedom to tell the truth. It's freedom to drown out the voices of corporations and their million dollar amplifiers with a bohemian poem, an organic rhyme of voices echoing each other, of fingers twinkling in the air like leaves, a poem set to the beat of a drum, streamed live to the nation and the world on the Internet. We can use our voices to speak a poem telling truth where before there were lies.
“The Framers [of the Constitution] knew that free speech is the friend
of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the
deadliest enemy of tyranny.” --Hugo Black
These ideas are the best contribution this nation, the United States of America, has made to human civilization. But the tree that grew from those seeds is now twisted, rotten with disease, the wood crumbling with termites. Those shining ideas have been, are being, and will be reduced to meaningless fluff by the criminals, liars, crooks and authoritarians who are driving this country straight into the ground.
Whether the crash will result in a disorderly collapse or a totalitarian police and surveillance state, I don't know.
I think I'm at a tipping point. I think I now truly BELIEVE that the whole entire system is fundamentally broken and absurd. I'm sad about this. It also brings an uncomfortable sense that the peaceful and quiet evenings I enjoy may be numbered. Wholesale social change is rarely orderly. Occupy Wall Street might, I think, be our last shot at meaningful change here. It may have to go quite far. It may be that if we fail, much is truly lost.
My girlfriend is watching video after video of the skirmishes as America took up the banner of the Arab Spring at #OccupyOakland. She's been crying about the Iraq veteran shot in the head with a gas canister, his skull cracked, his sleeping body lying in Intensive Care tonight. It makes me sad, too.
And for what does he lie there unconscious? Was there a point that needed proving by crushing a small gaggle of tent-campers trying to send a message down by City Hall in Oakland? We had to chop down those tents, drag the people out, and fire on them with rubber bullets, gas canisters and stun grenades? What greater good was gained by the population of Oakland, and of California, and of the United States by crushing their place? This was a camp where they chose to sit because nobody running the show gave a shit that they can't get jobs, they lost homes, they saw families broken, they just graduated and have 15 years debt to pay, they were forced to choose between ramen noodles and penicillin prescriptions last time they were sick.
This was a camp with one purpose: to engage in speech of the most very important kind.
"Hi. We're here. We have a long list of wrongs you've done us. And we're going to point at you, swindling bankers, corporate cronies, scuttling lobbyists, craven politicians, and we're going to say: We're watching you. And you'll take your hand out of our wallets, now, or we'll return it to you severed."
And the police followed their orders and silenced that speech.
Do they work for the banks?
At this point, why bother keeping any of it separated? Simply make it more efficient: remove the illusory paperwork divisions between criminal "business interests" and their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the standing army of police they order around by proxy.
The police are present in all our cities and towns and, I deeply hope, not without their own conscience as human beings. It is up to them to refuse unlawful and morally indefensible orders from their masters.
Long live the Constitution, long live the best intent it was drafted under, long live the Bill of Rights. I love the principles this country was founded on. In that sense, I'm a proud American to the very heart and always will be. The "system," though -- that's done for.
I'm flying the Cascadian flag in my picture window now, for what it's worth.