At Occupy Philly

At Occupy Philly last night I saw the worn out underclass faces of those who remain. Police and news media like vultures encircled the site. I felt the waiting sense of panic and stress-- the thought of: what happens next? Many of their number had just been arrested two blocks away, at a bank.

Don't kid yourself. Many of the holdouts are feeling the brunt of the recession. Homeless; chronically unemployed; working class students with enormous loan debt they'll never be able to pay back, They have a reason to be scared and angry. As, in a different way, so do many in the Tea Party, those small business persons who've put their lives into fledgling endeavors and are barely hanging on, close to losing everything. They may scorn the homeless in the Occupy encampments, but their biggest fear is joining them.

Right now when I speak about Occupiers I'm not talking about Harvard grads or n+1 staffers. I mean the real 99%-- not the Haves but the Have Nots. Not the paid professional activists on the Left, but neither am I speaking about the paid professional pundits on the Right. Nor the "Reasonable Solutions" people. Nor the Senators in Washington on both sides of the aisle deciding the nation's fate. They're not hurting. None of their kind are hurting. They're only good with their mass media lapdogs at manipulating the anger on all sides out there and keeping the hurting people divided, so they can maintain their station. It's why I strongly suspect partisanship and ideology. I see scoundrels on both sides.

Will the house-of-cards balloon society kept going with hot air collapse? The Overdogs don't yet know what that feels like. When I was something of an activist, with the ULA (Underground Literary Alliance) my Overdog opponents couldn't comprehend my anger. But, you see, I lived through the economic devastation of Detroit. I know what it's like when your world ideals included collapses on top of you.

Just blowing off steam. . . .