in Life's name and for Life's sake

Now, I'm no political analyst and I don't read the papers as often as I should, nor have I actually been down to Wall Street because dear god school is killing me, but I live here (where "here" is both the United States in general and New York City specifically) and I figure I might as well throw my two cents in.

A lot of people don't understand what these protests are about. They talk about how untenable it is to be united against something instead of fighting for something. But the thing that strikes me the most about this style of protest is that it opens up a dialogue -- not just a dialogue in the media, but a dialogue between and among protesters. It gets all the people most involved and puts them physically in the same place as one another. The great thing about the "Arab Spring" occupy movements was the way in which the tent cities that sprang up allowed for protesters to have discussions with fellow protesters, who may have had very different reasons for being there and very different priorities when it came to reconstruction.

People talk about "grassroots political movements" but mostly what they mean is that some politician with his team of political advisors has created a plan that he will then do his best to turn into a popular slogan. The plan is disseminated by the people, among the people, but it is not ultimately a plan that has been built by the people. When representative democracy in the capitols and in city halls fails, those citizens who care will find democracy on the streets. They will build their own plans from the ground up, and they will work to implement them. And they will work all the harder because these are plans that they have created, based on what they want, not on what someone else thinks they want.

And yes, this is untenable because not everyone wants the same things. At some point there will have to be compromise. But this way, that compromise can be thought through literally "on the ground" rather than by politicians, who have different criteria for compromise than the average person. Even if the proposals generated by the Occupy movement are not taken up, they are important, because they have been produced and consolidated in a truly unique way. To me, this is a significant factor that can't be overlooked.

I will now end with a relevant (though out of context) Mario Savio quote:

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

This short article about the printing class I'm currently enrolled in ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle! My professor is not the one they spend most of the article talking about (and when reading this article, I am inclined to think that my professor is not nearly as cool as Les, whose class my fantastic Natalie-friend is taking), but the facts are the same. Well, except that we'll be printing an excerpt from the diary of a young woman who moved from New York to California during the gold rush and ended up becoming a teacher in mining towns before settling down in Oakland.

So cool!

 So for a Creative Writing exercise, I have to find an odd news story and then write about one of the people in it, developing them as a character.  I haven't found anyone I really want to write about yet, but this story came up.

Father finds son dead in vat of acid

Johnny was a chemist's son, but Johnny is no more
For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4!

Depressing, but it needed to be said.