When I was first asked point blank what I thought of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I said that I was sympathetic to their grievances, but that I thought that their movement was pointless. This is still essentially my position.
How does this relate to the Underworld? Several ways. I will explain.
The Underworld exists. Certain groups with deep pockets exist. There are some really Bad Dudes out there -- dudes who can kill presidents, take down towers, start wars, crash economies and impoverish Third World nations and get away with it.
How do we fight the Underworld? What are our weapons? What tools? What techniques?
According to our friends in Occupy, the answer is to move to a park somewhere in a public space, protest and be homeless. Occasionally have meetings and beat on drums, but that's about it.
Initially, the idea of such civil disobedience sounds sexy and edgy: after all didn't Jesus and the disciples live more or less homeless and hang out with throngs of people?
Welllll......sort of, but it was different.
Jesus was a carpenter. He had a trade. So did the disciples. So did Saint Paul. They lived poor and lived like beggars, sure. But they were also capable. They could do stuff.
The Occupy protesters appear, to me anyway, to be a varied assortment of folks who have been screwed by the industrial economy--college students, homeless people, veterans and the unemployed. The Underworld has left these poor people in the dust--in debt, without a home, without work and without dignity. They protest and bring themselves low, living like homeless people to make their point.
Our posture is important. If we are to stand up to the Underworld, how should we do so? If we strip ourselves of our possessions and live in a public park, refusing to move for routine maintenance and cleaning, wailing for hours on end our grievances against the Underworld, telling the whole world that we have been screwed, what do we look like?
We look weak. We look vulnerable. By bringing ourselves to the lowest, most abject level of poverty (and let's be clear, urban poverty is the most abject form of poverty) where we have nothing that we can use to sustain ourselves (we are land-less), where we are utterly dependent upon hand-outs from strangers in order to buy food mass-produced by the food industrial complex, we are admitting to everyone that hope is lost.
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with presenting myself in that way. Surely all hope is not lost. Surely we, as citizens, have skills, friends and networks where we could could hope to sustain ourselves in faith to each other.
Will I have the same opportunities as other generations? No. But this does not mean that all hope is lost. Maybe living in poverty will make us better people. Maybe destroyed opportunity is a blessing in disguise. If there are no Joneses to keep up with, where will we be, and where will the Underworld be?
If we are unable to live within the Underworld's consumer paradigm, then we are, at least in our minds, on our way to liberation. The Underworld knows it can control us if it keeps us hooked on buying its products, using its money and taking the "Mark" as it were. Stripped of the ability to live in the world of endless Things, left more with our own things, we see the world more as it is, rather than the fantasy we have been sold by the corporations.
The most effective way to fight Wall Street greed is not to complain and whine before them day and night. That, to me, is highly ineffective and unwise. We can fight them by showing them we no longer need them. We can fight them by forming a parallel economy where we learn to do for ourselves and take care of ourselves, by learning new skills and ways of living.
When the Occupy crowd starts talking about soil quality and how typewriters are better than computers, and paper and pencil is a hell of a lot better than either typewriter or computer, I'll know that they're headed in the right direction. Until then, I'll have to stand in skepticism of their movement, although I sympathize with their grievances.
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