Newt Gingrich’s full name is DeFigville Newtrino Pavel Simeonovich Khalid LaToya Lufthansa Pepper Baby-Spice Ginger-Richmond III, Esquire.
Mitt Romney has a mole on his left shoulder blade that bears a striking resemblance to Ron Paul.
Rick Perry was the captain of his school’s champion “stay off the grass” team. Continue reading
Tents. They pitched tents.
Or they stood their ground to say “this is wrong”. They wanted to make people think about the world we live in, to talk about why it’s fair that we have people starving and struggling to scrape by while others hoard an ever-larger slice of a shrinking pie. Why banks get a bailout from the commonwealth but can’t be bothered to spare the commonwealth the trauma of foreclosures, tight-fisted loan policies, and fees on fees created solely to preserve profits lost when the laws change to give the rest of us a little protection for a change.
At the core, that’s what they stood for: change. Things have to change. People need to see. There has to be justice.
And they got clubbed, pepper-sprayed, and dragged off by the hair.
I don’t entirely get the Occupy movement. I agree with their spirit. Things need to change. Money is too much in power, and there are still too few people engaged in service to the community. (We take pride in being a bastion of democracy, but India and Japan both have consistently higher voter turnouts. And neither of those nations has anything like our traditions of liberty and human rights.)
But I don’t trust what I see as the vagueness of the movement. Back in college, when I was still pretending to be a Christian for my parents’ benefit, I wrote an essay for my father about why the church our family had been part of for generations was doomed. My father preached in a non-demoninationsl church called the Church of God. It had no orthodoxy, no hierarchy – if you asked them what they belieived, they would say they believed in the Word of God.
So do the Mennonites, the Mormons, the Catholics, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and any number of other disparate groups. And while they generally share certain core beliefs, they differ pretty widely on how those beliefs manifest themselves and are to be implemented in daily life. Saying you believe in the Bible is roughtly as meaningful as saying you believe in freedom: there’s a lot of wigggle room there.
My argument was that this lack of an ideology meant that the Church of God would inevitably devolve into the kind of community church its most ardent followers tended to scorn: a place for trendy feel-good worship without spine or substance. If you won’t say what you believe in, then you either get hijacked by those who will or you fade into irrelevance and obscurity. I think this is particularly true of organizations whose primary focus is ideology.
So while I sympathize with the Occupiers, I have trouble doing much more. I don’t know what they plan to do, how they plan to do it, or what they want. Yes, reform is badly needed. We need compassion in capital, we need to balance the principled and the practical, we need to start talking with instead of talking to. We need to wake up as a people and start expecting better instead of cynically shrugging off the influence-dealing and corruption. We need to start talking about what’s right again. (And, I would add, we need to stop ceding the arguments about morality and family values to those on the far right.)
But what does that mean in practical terms? What’s the win state here? I don’t know. And I have a hard time moving without some sense of direction.
The recent violent responses show the Occupiers are trying the patience of those in authority. And they should be. Those in authority need to recognize the authenticity, validity, and commitment of the movement. They need to open a dialogue to start addressing the very real problems that have the Occupiers huddled in parks and public spaces over nights growing longer and colder. So long as the official response to the Occupiers is silence, the Occupiers’ repsonse to officialdom should be non-violent resistance.
I got the “the top 1% pay 99% of the income tax” and “our system of government needs to quit pitting the haves against the have nots” arguments today from my brother. He’s a smart guy, and a good guy, but he’s much more the son our parents had in mind than I am. He’s not quite as reflexively conservative as they are, and his taste in churches is somewhat more modern, but he’s still very much of the same mindset as the rest of my relatives: those lazy, crazy kids camped out on Wall Street need to get jobs and stop griping so they can hack off a hunk of the American dream for themselves and their kids. Enough with the protesting already!
I pointed out that his numbers were wrong: the IRS’s own data shows the top 3% of filers paid less than 30% of the overall income taxes paid in 2008 (the last year for which I could find that kind of data, but I’m doubtful the numbers moved very far in the direction he suggests). But there’s more I wanted to tell him.
I doubt I could say it better than they have at Gizmodo, so I won’t say much.
Steve, you were a fantastic designer and innovator. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be in love with a phone or that I could have a handheld device that does even a fraction of what my iPad does, I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet here we are, thanks to you. I’m sorry you had to go so soon. Thanks for all you’ve done to make the world a simpler, more elegant place.
I can be a pretty strongly change-averse person. So it surprises me a little to say this, but here it is: I don’t really care about the changes to Facebook, and I don’t understand all the ruckus that goes on when they happen. (Let the irony and mocking commence!)
