September 29, 2011 by dandelionsalad
by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Sept. 29, 2011
Image by marniejoyce via Flickr
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on
Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the
country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct,
in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering
by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the
ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive
enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the
intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair
and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
To be declared innocent in a country
where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate
coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to
joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal
surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas
corpus no long[er] exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more
than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and
discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the
sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to
do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the
suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to
be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.
Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are
determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are
terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on
motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers
hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic
nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street
leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in
Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to
gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children
outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in
the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run
the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that
pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the
corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you,
how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an
obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in
their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out
of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million
people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills
and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is
spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students,
spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they
have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.
The only word these corporations know is more. They are
disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers,
from education to Social Security, because they want that money
themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be
tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner
city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let
the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let
the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to
swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers,
police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the
ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power
grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble
or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather
patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the
melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air
increase until the species dies.
Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry
or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is
what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs
deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they
will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children
and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see
that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and
supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of
sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the
demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are
frog-marched toward self-annihilation.
Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment
of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or
comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally
faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled.
They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought
possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded
by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too
long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office
towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they
will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out
of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are
the best among us.
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
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[DS added the video.]
MiniRtist on Sep 29, 2011
09-29-11 1b – Leftward Ho! with Bernie Sanders – Countdown with Keith Olbermann
More videos: http://vodpod.com/dandelionsalad/tag/occupy+wall+street
***
Get Involved: Occupy Together
see
Save the Postal Service Rally + Occupy Wall St goes Postal
Chris Hedges: Occupy Wall Street Interview – We have a moral imperative to fight for life
#OccupyWallStreet: Police Kettling Protesters + Live Stream + Protesters arrested
#OccupyWallStreet Protesting Outside Wall Street + Live Stream
This Hero Didn’t Stand a Chance by Chris Hedges
Report from the Frontlines: The Long Road to #OccupyWallStreet and the Origins of the 99% Movement | David DeGraw
The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2
http://vodpod.com/dandelionsalad/tag/economy
