OWS - 3 Quarks Daily

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and America today is beginning to smell worse.

Why? Because even though South Africa stunk headier than an elephant's poo after a rainy day, its black majority knew what they wanted and knew the country would be theirs one day. In America, it's by no means certain that the country will ever belong to its majority (or that its majority even knows what it wants).

We're not a country anymore, we're a racket run by the likes of a corrupt and immoral Wall Street. We have miserably failed at the single most basic organizing principle of any civilized society: how do you prevent the elite from stealing everything?

We haven't. They've done it. They've stolen everything. Our elite have stolen our money, our government, our legal system and our power from we, the people.

They've got it all, and we've got crumbs.

The difference between the 1% and the 99% is not simply economic. Not simply, for example, that we pay 35% taxes and big corporations either pay nothing — GE — or less than 2% — Goldman Sachs. The difference is moral and legal: folks at the top can torture and cheat and steal and lie and endanger the livelihoods of everyone else around them, and get away with it.

Our American elite is now as shitty as the Gaddafis and the Mubaraks and the Mugabes, and just about as crazy in their entitled bubble of runaway greed. Worst of all, they operate beyond the reach of the law. Too big to fail and too big to jail.

Photographs from Zuccotti Park

Notes on Zuccotti Park One: Mic Check! A Pay Check Away From You.

Mic check!

They are just a pay check away from being you. Take strength

Keep your courage, for yourself

And for them, they need you.

They who are today up there

Imprisoned– parked in concrete shelves—scraping the skies.

In these towers rising all around you

Surrounded by walls

Clinging to a useless fantasy that these streets are meant to lead them

To those paved with gold

But no! Yours is the golden path.

You who sit here in the park, enclosed by police barricades-

Liberated by thoughts, your dialogue.

Under an October night sky without stars

Sounds of your drums beat the police sirens

And rise above the din of ongoing construction

Called Freedom at the crossroads

Of Trinity and Liberty.

And there, a surveillance—NYPD tower

And a sign that says no skateboarders allowed in the Park.

Winter’s mist begins to rise off the damp pavements.

You see the lit windows high above

And you think they shine like places light years distance from you

Here in the park in the darkness below,

As though signaling–a passing, to you.

Silhouettes framed in the windows high up above you

In amber light, they appear caught in an eternity of fear, petrified.

And you sympathize

For rents have to be paid, mortgages met

What happens if there is no pay check?

They know they are just a paycheck away from you.

As you Mic check, in your attempt to reach them,

They know this too: it is not light that distances them from you—

They are just a pay check away from you.

Tag: OWS

Monday, October 10, 2011

Notes On Zuccotti Park