Occupy Wall Street Reflection

So, I was roving around Facebook, as I’m wont to do and I saw a post that one of my friends had posted that said “We didn’t break the system. It was built that way.” That statement in and of itself leads one to probe back and think about how far back do we think about this system that’s vastly morphed from simply the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to what we have today.

And as I read the comments… it made me think more.

My friend’s comments were level-headed and pretty well thought out. And then there was one person… Their suggestion was “Fuck them all!”, “Kill them all!” and “Bury them alive!”

I can relate to feeling that frustrated. I have felt that frustrated since Al Gore had the election taken from him and it was given to Bush the second. I have been unhappy with how this country’s gone. We keep progressing further and further right, not realizing that that is just not feasible to run a country without balance. We did this before and wound up with a Great Depression. I’m not entirely sure that that lack of balance hasn’t set us up in to a second Great Depression.

But let me go back to the key point: “We didn’t break the system. It was built that way.”

How far back do we go to talk about “the System”? Do we go back to the country’s inception where the base intention was equality in a time where all things were not equal as we had a functioning slave trade. And while a lot of the founding fathers owned slaves (not all did, like Benjamin Franklin, for instance), they still desired for equality and freedom. Yes, I realize that in and of itself is hypocritical. It’s the philosophy that is important though. Honestly, it was a great foundation for the birth of a nation. Being part of the people who were nullified by this nation, and to be saying that I think it’s a fair foundation… that’s saying something.

As the nation morphed and grew, the system had to morph with it. It wasn’t the most ideal or even the best idea. But it is what it is.

We had a nation that moved out of feudalism and into something that hadn’t been touched since ancient Greece, Democracy.

And it’s probably the best political theory that can actually work, not something that just works in theory. (Insert Homer Simpson “Sure, Communism works… in theory…” quote here.) It’s not without its problem. And we have seen the insidious hands of greed take a stranglehold of our nation creating a system that is even worse than feudalism. We are all now slaves to the corporations. And the distribution of wealth is so cockeyed that only 1% of the population now has control of a majority of the wealth. That is scary.

I’m going to go back to the initial question, how far do we go back? At almost every point in history, around the world, we find that someone has been exploited by someone else. It even goes as far as the animal kingdom. So, who do we blame? Or do we just destroy this world and humanity and call it a lost cause?

I don’t think that we need to be that irrational.

I think that we can fix this system, but we need to balance out the radical right with a bit of radical left. We need real progressives. We need people who are willing to fight for the people with the same passion that the Republicans are fighting for the corporations and the rich.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXXzaaL8Khw]