I’m Just Sayin’

I’m sitting in a restaurant looking across the street at the “Occupy” demonstrators camped-out on the mall of the Hennepin County building (sounds bourgeois doesn’t it?). The “why” behind these satellite demonstrations escapes me, as does the scattered messaging. Indeed, a recent New York Times front page photo collage displayed signs at a like-demonstration that ran the gamut of disenchantment, e.g., “Young, Educated, and Unemployed,” “Reform Corporate Welfare,” “End the Fed,” “Stop The Wars,” “9-11 Was an Inside Job,” and “I’m Very Upset.” None really appeared to make much sense, other than to register the age-old primal gripe with The Man.

One huge sign got my attention, and my goat: BAIL OUT THE POOR!, it demanded. I thought, really? Bail out the poor? This made about as much sense as the “9-11 Was an Inside Job” sign.

A pundit remarked a few years ago that America lies dormant in a “sensitivity coma,” a hyper-state in which “All God’s Children” qualify automatically for all manner of consideration, tolerance, and support, ranging from nursing home and health care subsidies to food stamps and unemployment checks, to waivers after breaking immigration laws to all manner of hand-outs and bail-outs. Free lunches for everyone.

This week David Brooks wrote, “While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission. Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values.” I would submit that part of that repair should involve re-valuing our belief in the no-brainer of free enterprise, that is, hard work – bad breaks = better place. The poor can claim a lot of bad breaks, but how many went to and stayed in school, graduated, stayed away from having babies out of wedlock or getting arrested, learned to communicate in English, got a job, and then worked their asses off with intention, absorbing every word and watching every signal and cue from every boss, peer, and competitor? Had they been able to do so, they would have earned adequate resources to survive, maybe even becoming self-sufficient, if not downright comfortable.

I have no interest in bailing out the poor and neither should you. What the poor need are resources, education, and the will to attempt the struggle. Rather than bail them out, let’s equip them with the chance to succeed and then let them sink or swim in our survival-of-the-fittest world, like we all do. It begins and ends with education. Require it, enforce it. No exceptions. I promise the number of poor people will diminish and that dude with the sign will have lost a reason not to go find a job himself.

And those still looking for a bail-out? You can always keep yourself busy going to “Occupy” gatherings. The better alternative being a verse in Galatians that reminds us of a 2,000-year-old truism, you reap what you sow.

Incidentally, that’s particularly relevant for The Man.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

It’s stunning. Our world is in bona fide revolution. Protest movements are mobilizing in more places than ever in human history.

 

But why? In the aggregate, the human race is less oppressed today than at any other time. Yes, there are still millions suffering under the thumb of dictators, fundamentalist clerics, and outright tyrants, but probably fewer by far than in any previous century. So why is the world so hell bent on hitting the streets and trying to get their world leaders run out of town?

 

Because they can!

 

That oft-used ’60s chant, “The Whole World Is Watching,” has never been more true. Like it or not, we live ubiquitously under a relentless digital lens. Despots don’t find it as easy to squash a few thousand protesters when their every move is being reported to billions of planetmates via cell phone video and Twitter feeds.

 

You can’t help but marvel at the stunning freedom of participation made possible by social media. The Egyptian revolt exploded, goaded on by a simple message from a local Google executive insisting that things need not be the way they are.

 

But it’s not just about being mad as hell and not willing to take it. It’s about people becoming smarter than their governments and the politicians that run them. Whether those same people do anything constructive once the walls come tumbling down is something else altogether.

 

But to what end? The obvious answer is that all anyone really wants is a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, no small thing, as we Americans know.

 

Peel away all the layers of this particular onion and you find an inexorable, game-changing shift, seriously and irrevocably raising humanity’s collective bar. As McLuhan said, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

 

I remember back in the ’70s waiting for the moon to finally make it to the seventh house and for Jupiter to align with Mars. Regrettably, the only signs of the onset of the Age of Aquarius was Nixon resigning and bell bottoms going off trend. I had the same feeling around Y2K, another non-event. But with the world coming apart and coming together all at the same time, Aquarius may simply have been mistimed, now that the Zodiac keepers have admitted to balling up the astrological charts. A new age appears to be staring us dead in the face!

 

Release the Gorgon!