Letters To The Occupants (non-fiction, op-ed)

A collection of reflections on the Occupy Movement as it progressed from its inception to the fall of the camps.

New Slavery

/ JillArcangela / 1 Comment

With the Paul Ryan budget plan being passed through the greasy hands of 1% lackeys in Congress, the recent hike in student loan interest rates, and everyday Americans – in their struggle to make ends meet – slapping everything from gas and groceries to the mortgage payment on their plastic, it is hard to avoid the topic of debt.

When most Americans think about the “debt crisis,” we think of the national debt.  Since our bills for the Revolutionary War started rolling in, the national debt has been a thorn in the side of the American people and our politicians.  Some presidents, beginning with Andrew Jackson, made it their mission to eliminate the debt.  Others, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the national debt as a way to invest in the future of America, investments that paid off with a thriving middle-class and secure economic times.  Some spent without looking, carelessly and unnecessary on trumped-up conflicts, overzealous defense systems, even high-priced contracts to vice presidential cronies; and then there were those, like Ronald Reagan, who actually propagated totally fabricated economic theory because those who wrote the actor’s script were poised to profit from such lies for generations.

Though the national debt is indeed a crisis, the real problem exists far from the Hill in the check registers of average Americans.  With more than 80% of Americans strapped with debt in one form or another, many of them owing tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt alone, we have entered into a new kind of civilization – one of indirect indentured servitude.

Now, I’m going to be honest and tell you that my husband and I (living together 14 years) have no debt.  We own our car; we rent our home; we funded our wedding with DIY, savings, and gifts; and we live within our means.  I was blessed to have parents who were not only willing but fiscally nimble enough to manage their debt successfully and pay the portion of my college tuition that wasn’t covered by academic scholarships (they paid tuition for all four of their children – and since the youngest graduated a few years ago, they spend a week in the tropics annually – celebrating their financial freedom, I’m sure).  To this day, to be honest, I don’t know how my parents accomplished so much with one income.  I only know that when things were lean, they were really smart, and when things were lush, they were even smarter.

Money wasn’t really discussed in my family.  There wasn’t much to talk about.  Our needs were met – no labels attached; we vacationed mostly in tents; and complaints were only heard on the fourth Friday in February (do the math).  Anything else you wanted, you earned the money for yourself.  My working papers were signed a week before my 14th birthday, and I had my first job the week after.  I worked from that week until I had my son two years ago.  I, like my mother before me, am a stay-at-home mom – not because I can afford to be, but because it is (to my family) worth the sacrifices.

For years, I thought that people who had debt – aside from the obvious like cars, homes, or college – had it because they were foolish.  I was raised to believe that if you couldn’t pay in cash than you couldn’t have it, and my first (and short-lived) experience with a credit card taught me how incredibly important it is to live by that rule.  I watched people put their egos before their sensibility, brainwashed by the season’s must-haves to the point of financial disaster, a coach purse that carried an empty wallet and a two digit interest rate.  I never felt sorry for these people.  I still don’t.

The trouble today is that the majority of people in the sinking ship of personal economics are in it because they have to feed their kids, not because they have to wear Prada.  True, there is an entire class of wanna-be-Joneses who are burdened with large homes, luxury cars, and blatant ignorance, but a growing number of us are feeling the weight of far more reasonable and unavoidable costs.  The cost of living is climbing daily but the wages we earn don’t budge, stretching the resources of everyday people to the limit.  In desperation, things like rent, electricity, food, and fuel begin making appearances on the monthly Visa statement with increasing frequency, while securities like health insurance and savings accounts go by the wayside.

Meanwhile, resistance to a life of poverty feeds the debt disaster by pulling in thousands upon thousands of young adults with every graduation ceremony.  They may as well shackle you with a ball-and-chain as you cross the stage.  With few prospects for those holding just a high school diploma, and not many more for those holding only bachelor degrees, students are being roped into loans they’ll be paying off until they retire, if they retire before reaching the age of infirm.

This vicious cycle of debt and struggle is peddled, of course, by none other than the filthy rich and their political custodians.  Turning the wheels on the rack, stretching every monetary limb of those who have nothing left to lose, and wringing every last cent from our financial lives are those who have nothing left to gain.  The people at the top are so disproportionately well-off that they have to get creative to spend the money they take from those who are literally going hungry.  And all the while, the system in play is being purported as necessary, acceptable, and even healthy by a group of political vultures granted access by their criminal handlers to the rotting remains of the bloodied middle-class.

What will happen to these predators and scavengers when they have consumed us all?  How will they feed their insatiable need for constant fiscal growth then they have absorbed all there is?  When the rest of civilization lies in ruin?  Will they then turn the chains of debt into chains of iron?  Rounding up the poor, starving masses to do their bidding in exchange for food?  After all, those who have nothing to trade, no money, no goods, have only themselves to give – only their physical resources with which to earn.

Will we witness offices in which people are paid in food rations?  Stylists tipped with half empty tubes of mousse?  Farmers whipped in their own fields?  Not likely, but if you extract the flow of cash from the current scenario, it is exactly what you already have: people forced into slavery by their financial obligations, obligations determined by those on the receiving end.

How do we free ourselves from this system?  How do the extorted beat the racket?  The only thing that comes to mind is the shear (albeit bizarre) genius of Fight Club.  However, since Ed Norton isn’t actually a split-personality with a secret army of dedicated blue-collars, and destroying a handful of buildings wouldn’t really reset the debt record, it just might be up to Occupy to break the silence and the chains of market slavery.

The first rule of Occupy is that you have to talk about Occupy.

Erosion

/ JillArcangela / 1 Comment

A game of legal cat-and-mouse is in full swing as legislatures scramble to outlaw everything that falls just outside the perimeters of that which is constitutionally protected.  You can protest, but not near any political figure relevant to your message.  You can vote, but not without this single, specific form of identification.  You can have an abortion, but not until we are done violating and humiliating you.  You can get an education, but not without the burden of lifelong debt.  You can have a picnic, but not without a permit.  Like a plane working its way across a piece of wood, the layers of our civil liberties and their protective laws are shaved away, landing coiled and useless on the floor as the corrupt and insane shape the new America.

Just beneath the gliding sound of the plane’s dark work, you can hear the lapping of the ocean – a vast body of corporate initiatives and the endless goals of the financially insatiable – as it pounds its relentless force against America’s delicate social fabric.  Cultural and religious freedoms, logic and reason, checks and balances, individual liberties, privacy, personal choice are all eroding along the edges of our society.  Each tumultuous swipe of the sea strips away more and more of that which we hold most dear.  Yet, unbelievably, the lemmings – distracted by imbecilic obsessions (“Did you watch Idol last night?!”), led by the cunning and manipulative (“Fracking is safe.”), and obliged by the insanely religious (“[The Christian] church needs to be the conscious of the nation!”) – keep marching headlong into the cold and terrible depths.

America was a nation built by people seeking freedom from judgment, discrimination, persecution, and fear.  It was a nation designed so every citizen could create a life individually tailored to him or her, in which personal goals could be set and met through hard work and determination.  It was a nation of hope and liberty in which all voices and matters could be heard and what is best for all could be deduced from intellectual debate – free from the slant of varying religious ideologies, unencumbered by the motives of small-minded men, and unmarked by the scars of ancient human error.  She has sadly now become her own adversary, blanketed in the filth of bigotry, hot with the tempers of misogynists and racists, and corrupted by limitless, unethical, and vicious greed.

Soldiers called by moral obligation, Occupiers and their supporters stream into the streets, driven by a fiery sense of urgency and invited by promises made to them in our founding documents.  The peaceful warriors who deny the continuously slipping status quo and fight for the fundamental rights that keep us from a swift descent back to the 14th century are met by the private armies of billionaires, both hunter and hound donning the uniforms of those sworn to protect us.  Like the Reich marched from the basements of Munich’s brew houses into the heart of the German people only to butcher it with a knife of pure evil, our public servants wear the badge of honor and the mask of deceit.

Make no mistake, our government is working quickly, quietly, and pointedly at political, societal, and legislative manipulations intended to control and stifle us.  Undoubtedly the new laws and market manipulations (from the Trespass Bill to the doubling of student loan interest rates) are maneuvers of those in power to improve their position, gaining from what the rest of us lose.  The steady erosion of our freedom serves to strengthen their political hand in a high-stakes game between the haves and the have-nots, America’s new aristocracy versus the strong and faithful who built this country with their bare hands.

Inevitably, the makers of this war on all that is fair and just will come to find that the people will only take so much.  Eventually the sugar-coma of modern life (or should I say, “high-fructose-corn-syrup-coma?”) will wear off.  The lemmings will realize, as they stare at the lessening shoreline, this year they don’t feel much like swimming.  With Occupy opening up in the spring warmth like the impatient crocus, spreading out across the land, carrying its message of freedom and justice farther than ever before, the criminals on the Hill will find the masses at their feet growing in number and in rage.

Rise, my fellow Americans, like the mountains – higher than the sea.  Stand up and preside over your nation with the same majesty and immovability.   Spring forth from the depths of those waters like the beautiful, volcanic islands that defy that rippling temper.  Push back against their attempts to strip from you that which is yours by birth, yours by right, yours by law.  No matter how many profanities they scribble on the pages of our history, they cannot erase what is already written there.  We have been endowed with certain unalienable rights.  We have the right to speak or yell or write…; we have the right to assemble peaceably and to be left in peace while we do so; we have the right to demand our government hear and address our grievances; the right to a trial by jury; the right to live free of involuntary servitude (even if those who attempt to enslave us are corporate entities); the right to a free and appropriate public education (for all students of all ages – post-secondary included); the right to a clean and safe abortion; the right to practice our religious beliefs even if those beliefs compel a person to practice no religion at all; the right to a safe work environment and fair compensation; the right to live without fear of discrimination – be it racial, gender-based, or for sexual preference; the right to drink clean water and breathe clean air…  the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These things cannot be taken from us unless we let them.  There are no laws, no chains, no cages that can contain what is right and good and fair.  We are not the sand and soil that washes clean away with no resistance to the ebbs and flows of their temperamental tides of change.  We are the rocks, the roots, the concrete pillars of a people who have proven time and time again that in the face of grave injustice, we stand united.  We will prevail.  We Will Prevail.  WE WILL PREVAIL.

How To Win A Neighborhood

/ JillArcangela / Leave a comment

Over my desk, I have a grease board.  It tells me what to do.  For weeks it has been telling me to write about the Trespass Bill, and I will, but not today.  Today, I have more pressing matters to address with you.

As you know, Occupy Jenkintown started here a few weeks ago.  I expressed, and still experience, excitement about the Occupation and my hopes for what it can accomplish.  There are problems, already, however.  These are not problems unique to this Occupancy.  In fact, they are the same problems that plague many Occupations and are of serious detriment to the movement if they are not addressed swiftly and effectively by all involved.

The Occupation in Jenkintown has taken its residency at the center of town in the “square,” which is a small space with a gazebo and a brick pavilion where we conduct most of our town events.  Everything from the annual Christmas Tree Lighting to the seven month-long weekly farmer’s market takes place here.  The farmer’s market, which is already being threatened by borough politics and a nearby indoor market about to open 7 days a week, draws considerable business to the community on what used to be the slowest day of the week.  With the market season quickly approaching, and local business owners on the far side of the pavilion already sweating over (what they claim to be) negatively affected sales, the relationship between Occupy and the community went from temperate to tenuous overnight.

Nothing is friendlier to the wildly passionate, the motivated protester, or the inner-hippie than a group of tents, but for those with more conservative life formats – even if they have shared political views – the tents seem messy, intimidating, and unapproachable.  Almost immediately, rumors of homelessness and filth erupted, as they have around all Occupations.  Swift “not in my backyard” mentalities roared to the surface.  A few people have approached the camp to discuss concerns (and the Occupiers are working out a new location so to not harm local businesses), but fewer have done so to find out more about Occupy and get involved.  This is a problem.  After all, isn’t raising public awareness and spreading the important messages of the movement the purpose of the Occupations?

In places like New York City, where tourism is everywhere and the population is incredible, the characteristics that make Occupations unapproachable to some seem to have less of an impact on the camp’s overall success, but it is all a game of averages.  The percentage of the population that is offended impacts the success of camps a lot less when the total population (100%) numbers into the millions.  In a small place, like Jenkintown – for example, the same ratio has a much greater affect.  Moreover, in smaller communities, where the majority of people already know (and have established feelings toward) one another, rumors and slander fester more quickly, more venomously, and more detrimentally.  You don’t have to get the vote of a board representing a million people with a million interests to push Occupy out.  All you have to do is get four friends to call “Fred,” the police chief who lives down the street.

If Occupy is going to meet the challenges of camping in small communities, its members cannot simply set up and sit in.  They have to show up and reach out.  The focus of small camps has to be on becoming part of the community.  Making this even more dynamic is that approaching people at random can be a bit of turn off to the blasé, non-political, and avid head-in-sanders, also creating a bad taste in the mouths of those we need to enlighten.  So, what do you do?

Invite them in.  Everyone loves a party, so throw one.  Sponsor small events cheaply by talking to local bands, business groups, and charitable clubs.  Bring some attractions to the space, and while the people are there, hand out information on Occupy’s issues, have fact sheets posted, organize tables that represent different local and national interest groups, and have a GA schedule posted.  Have sign-up sheets for specific types of emails: petitions, food news, women’s issues, local issues, etc., and narrow down what you are sending them.  (When I see a bunch of emails from one group flooding my inbox, it isn’t long before I put that group on my mental “auto-delete” list, highlighting for deletion as I read the sender, not the subject.)

While you are chatting it up with the locals, about more than politics – please, remember to ask questions about what needs to be done in their community, what their local concerns are, and how Occupy can help them meet the challenges they are facing.  In Jenkintown, we have a problem with vacant store fronts, a local economy that is surviving but not meeting its full potential, and property owners who don’t want to renovate crumbling commercial properties.  A reasonable way to reach out to the community would be to set up a space for a town meeting to address the issues, flyer the neighborhood advertising the meeting, and then head a local group that corrects the problems.  Every town has its issues.  Find out what they are and head organizations to address them.

I’ve heard a huge number of people take issue not with what Occupy wants but with what Occupy does.  They don’t feel that living in tents, blocking traffic, interrupting public speakers, and civil disobedience are mature and effective ways to combat the system.  Now, I’m not saying I agree.  I think every tactic has a time and a place.  I do, however, understand that we are not going to reach the rest of the 99% by continually reapplying the same tactics over and over.  What’s more, we are going to offend them and lose any chance we have of bringing them in.  Those we have not reached in six months need to be approached other ways.

It is harder to win a heart than take a park, to open a mind than pitch a tent, to create change than to recognize problems.  If you are going to win the war, you have to win the people.  I’ve been reeling (and often retching) over politics since I was old enough to understand what is unjust and unfair – and if you have kids, you know how young that can be!  The closer an issue is to home, the more important it is to people.  If you help them solve their problems, you win their trust and loyalty… which is exactly what we need if we are going to fix the problems within our Occupations, in communities around the country, and in the halls of America’s most powerful addresses.

Wag The Womb

/ JillArcangela / 1 Comment

We’ve all heard of wagging the dog, right?  It is the political protocol of those who are so deeply woven into the corruption that rots our political system that they are unable to discuss the actual issues.  The first time I distinctly remember anyone wagging the dog was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, during which time it was discovered that the then-President had approved the sale of military super computers to communist China, increasing China’s nuclear capabilities.  In the years since, I’ve noticed it happening every election and most days in between.

In the past few weeks, an argument over insurance covering pharmaceutical contraception has triggered a conversation that is so ridiculous it’s hard to believe it is actually being entertained.  For generations, it was up to insurance companies to hammer out the details of the plans they offered, and it was up to women and their gynecologists to determine their medical needs and measures.  With the rise of the spin doctor, however, medicine has become political gun powder.  Suddenly, I’m looking at a panel of five men – most of whom are sworn to celibacy and have (in theory) no sexual experience whatsoever and none of whom are medical professionals – publicly debating the religious correctness of women taking birth control.  As the news unfolds, all I can think is, “Where are we going, and why am I in this hand-basket?”

Setting aside the dubious separation between church and state, which summarizes to churches taking funding and wielding unreasonable political influence but paying no taxes, I can’t help but wonder what a different world this would be if men got pregnant instead of women.  A brave woman I know well often quotes an even braver friend who had once said that “if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”  The thought is striking, not only for its vulgarity but for the weight of what it implies.  First, that this is, for all our bra-burning, still a man’s world; and second, that the men of this world are still indulging at their gender-given ability to relieve themselves of any and all sexual responsibility, should he choose.  (Stay with me, guys…)

No one is arguing about whether or not insurance should be covering vasectomy.  (Many plans do.)  No one ever stands outside an abortion clinic with signs calling for the castration of dead beat dads, one-night wonders, or incestuous uncles.  No one ever yells about the guy who fathered multiple children and fell behind on his child support, blaming his morally questionable libido for an overextended welfare system.  Yet the women who bear the pregnancies, the children, and the scars of such circumstances come under attack constantly, from the ceaseless trimming of already insufficient social services to the threats of reducing access to care in women’s clinics.  These injuries are then peppered by the insulting rants of people like (Head-) Rush Limbaugh.

Without getting into the fact that the same groups of people who complain about legal abortions and birth control are also, ironically, often the same ones who want to cut welfare programs supporting the impoverished communities that most need access to such services, tossing aside the basic logic that if the poor and underinsured can’t get birth control then there will be more children on welfare…  Leaving alone the reality that conversations about the accessibility of women’s contraception should be about health and civil liberties, not morality and judgment…  Completely ignoring the fact that the support these arguments receive from notorious chauvinists and discriminators should be enough to send any sane person looking for the quickest way to distance himself…  These arguments are, without a doubt, nothing more than a simple diversion from the issues that are real and damaging to the nation.

Every election is the same routine, like a scene from a movie we have all watched a thousand times: a flaming arrow is shot into a barn while the thieves make off with the gold.  The powers-that-be ignite the crazies and gas the flames, creating a conflagration through the glare of which we cannot see the perils of their true workings.  People ignore the voting records of these politicians, their former-lobbyist appointees, their multi-million dollar estates, and hone in on arguments that appeal to their inner-bigot.  Meanwhile, they slowly chisel away our rights with things like indefinite detainment, the Trespass Bill, and surveillance drones, simultaneously lubricating countless palms (including their own) with plans for pipelines, fracking, and genetically modified foods.  The whole time, we are running back and forth dumping pint glasses of water on an inferno that is timed to self-extinguish the minute their deals are signed.

It is a series of marionettes cascading down the great political stage, puppets controlling puppets.  Wanting to change the conversation, the corporate puppet masters pull on the political representatives that are indebted to them.  The reps then pull on the leaders of special interest groups, because no one is happier to plunge us back into the dark ages; and they – in turn – yank the strings on the people they control with the most proven measure known to man: mysticism.  Within a hot media minute, the whole world is on its head in a mess of wood and string, a Pinocchio production gone berserk.

The current debates over things like women’s reproductive rights and civil unions are important issues, but they aren’t the issues.  The issues are the ones that allow systems like this to even exist.  The fact that we live in a society where access to affordable healthcare is a problem for millions; that corporations have the power to determine so much about how our government and society function; that politicians and their radical supporters can call women terrible names but can’t stand up to a Wall Street tycoon; that legislation can close health clinics serving the poor but not Bank of America; that five men with religion for a resume can speak about female contraception but the only human in the room who might actually take it isn’t allow to speak at all; all while the citizens acting as the voice of the people, carrying out their most basic right in a last-ditch effort to save the nation, are arrested for standing on the steps, not the sidewalk.

There is nothing new under the sun.  We are witnessing the old stand-by call from a worn out playbook, the burning barn.  So, while Occupy writes the current attack on women’s civil rights onto the schedule of teach-ins and rallies, adding it to the heaping junk pile of American issues we, the people, now need to address, it is critically important to see (and make clear to others) the overarching theme that ties all these issues together: America is being stolen from her people while the masses are gazing wide-eyed at the long-nosed liars parading from strings in a song and dance we know too well.  Cut the strings.  Free the people.  It is time to wag the tail, not the dog… or in the case of the current spectacle, the womb.

Meet The New Neighbors

/ JillArcangela / 4 Comments

The early signs of spring are appearing.  The promise of change and revitalization teases us in the form of trees with tiny buds, too young to be green, and the stump-ish beginnings of long, slender tulip pushing their stems through the soil’s surface.  But aside from the crocus, something else wonderful has popped up in my small town: tents.

I almost crashed my car when I saw them, honking in support – scaring the hell out of a guy sitting in camp… I’ve had some trouble containing my excitement.  Although the early onset of spring has me seriously worried about both my summer garden and a crop famine my unborn great-grandchildren might have to suffer through, I am truly revved up for spring… especially now that there is an Occupancy in my town.

Let me start by saying, thank you to Occupy Philly and the founding campers of Occupy Jenkintown.  Inspired by nothing short of brilliance, they have decided to bring the movement into places more graspable to those looking to get involved and more visible to those who are simply missing it.  While urban occupations are important and productive, they are also sitting in places that are relatively cut off from the people Occupy needs to reach next.

It is as though our nation is designed in circles.  Like those emanated from a stone thrown into calm water, populations ripple out of urban centers in decreasing magnitude as they delineate.  Since September 17th, the stamina of the movement has been discussed by everyone on all sides, as has its ability to reach large portions of the nation.  This is the first real sign that Occupy may be up to challenge.

Jenkintown is small.  It is just over one half of a square mile, which means our annual 5K race has to loop through as well as round our town.  In truth, however, we are small but mighty.  About 4,500 people call this bite-size borough home, a pretty dense population.  We have our own school district and police force.  We are encapsulated on all sides by the American phenomenon of true suburb, thickly populated and overrun with corporate chains of every kind, but our town prides itself on a central hub of Mom-and-Pop shops, a farmers market, and an historic movie theater that we faithfully support.  We are primarily middle-class, and we are – like most – feeling the sting of the corporate-political bully who has been slapping America in the face for decades.

My neighborhood is ripe for change, as are countless others across the states.  Setting up tents and signs, and working with Occupy Philly to make sure that there is a constant presence (when local Occupants are at work or at OP functions) brings the movement and its message into the path of the average American.  It makes representatives accessible to people who may be on the fence or plainly uninformed.  It helps make involvement and interaction a possibility when driving into the city for a GA at dinner time, leaving the family behind, after a long day at work doesn’t seem so desirable.

Most importantly, however, it takes the very important step of extending the possibility of true democracy.  For generations, we’ve been calling America a democracy, but it is not now – and never really was – a democracy.  We live in a Republic, a governmental structure that empowers representatives to hold office and work (in theory) on behalf of the people.  A representative system has the strong advantage of narrowing the political players into smaller, more productive groups, but it bears the characteristic burdens of easy corruptibility and simple misrepresentation, two problems that ail the current system.

In a true democracy, the people are engaged, educated, and participating in the decisions being made.  They are the government.  They make the decisions as a unit.  Democracy, surprisingly, is natural to species throughout the animal kingdom.  It is how herds and flocks of all kinds decide when and in which direction to move, and in some cases, it even holds contention is whether the winner of a fray becomes the seated alpha of a pack.  It isn’t always harmonious, and it certainly isn’t easy – especially with populations into the billions – but it can work.

The trick to a better, stronger America is to make it work in cooperation with a representative system, and that starts with tents in places like Jenkintown.  By engaging the members of smaller communities, bringing real, counter-media information to its members, and making people unavoidably aware of what is happening within the small offices of the local representatives we largely ignore, Occupy can stretch direct democracy into functioning reality.  We can hold these elected officials accountable, force them to represent us, and remove them from office if they don’t.

What’s more, if we directly involve the people in small communities, particularly in the further, less pronounced ripples of the population circles, we can reeducate people about the realities of consumption and the effects it has on human and political behaviors (as well as the environment).  In towns like mine, Occupy has a leg up.  We are a small borough surrounded by larger, commercially dense communities, but we stick to our own and forge strong personal relationships with one another and with the small businesses owned and operated by our community members.

In larger areas like those around Jenkintown, that lack town centers of commerce and community, Occupy will face greater challenges in uniting the people.  Engaging in local politics, acting in schools, shaking hands with local business owners, and handing out information in places like parking lots will help the movement root itself in these less centered areas.  Similar strategies will help bring Occupy into the fold of more rural communities as well.  If we can successfully reach out to these communities, unit the people by finding their common ground, and promote basic political, social, and economic understanding, we can raise these communities from crowds of apathetic consumers to educated, aware social participants.

Imagine what we would be capable of if people saw themselves as not only members of empowered local communities but empowered national communities – or, dare I say, the human community.  We could control the people who are controlling us; we could put the full-court press on representatives who use blatant manipulation and bold-faced lies to retain their power and position; we could level the playing field and stop the exploitations of our people and planet that will surely spell our inevitable doom; we could oppose the growing volumes of ridiculous and unconstitutional legislation meant to suppress the people and their voice; we could wield the power bestowed on us by our forefathers.

So, while I swallow the jagged pill of early spring, the frightening reality of yet another weak winter, the foreshadowing of increased garden pests and fierce allergies, I admit there is something beautiful about the warmer weather… the furling and flapping of tent tarps and cardboard.  Though I am constantly worried that the planet might be dying, liberty is alive and well – as is the promise of a still blooming and growing Occupy movement.   If for that alone, I can peacefully and honestly proclaim my welcome to spring.

Community

/ JillArcangela / 2 Comments

My husband is a “t.v. guy.”  If it was up to me, I’d toss my television out a window and into the yard where I would proceed with large implements of destruction like an ax, a chainsaw, and possibly a wood chipper.  Everything about television from the violent and sudden changes in volume (particularly during commercials) to the garbage they are peddling as important to society (like who will be the next idol-in-the-pan and the Kardashians – who are famous for what, exactly?) annoys me on a basic level.  Yet, somehow, I married a person who watches incessantly.

In his recent tuning-ins, he’s been watching a show called Doomsday Preppers.  I have never been the doom-and-gloom type, and I don’t intend to start now.  However, we have to understand that, now more than ever, the chance of a societal meltdown is very real.  This is, in fact, part of what Occupy stands in the face of: the deconstruction of life as we know it, the collapse of a functioning social structure, an inevitable conclusion if the current unchecked economic power system stays in place.  Whether it is a food system failure, an environmental crisis, an economic collapse, or even civil or world war, we are suddenly standing at the brink of something.  Hopefully, it is greatness, but even steel is forged in fire…

Nevertheless, I suppose I should count my blessings that at least what my husband is watching is somewhat intellectually based and not of the TMZ variety, and admittedly, you can learn a lot about catastrophe survival from the borderline insane who are bracing for it at every moment.  Store items of basic necessity; learn how to procure food independently of the market; and be able to defend yourself because in every Doomsday prophecy there is the part where desperate people do desperate things.  This is the part the strikes me most.  We are keenly aware that in an emergency situation people will push for their individual survival, even if that means literally stepping on someone else.

Of course, when we look at people in emergency situations, as we are all glued to the footage from the Costa Concordia’s botched evacuation, we experience sympathy for them.  We can understand the pushing, the chaos, the fear, yet we often forget to measure in our basic human history and the thing that has been all but conditioned out of us.  Like modern chickens that have forgotten to sit on their own eggs or turkeys that are incapable of foraging for food, we have left behind the very thing that saved humanity from extinction thousands of years ago: community.

For those of you who passed Bio before science has revealed our true human history, or if you went to one of those schools run by geniuses who don’t believe in teaching evolution, there was – at one time – great variety in the human species.  In fact, it is believed that numerous types of human ancestors inhabited common spaces and literally fought one another for survival.  After centuries of natural selection weeding out the losers in this miraculous honing, only two species remained: Cro-Magnon Man and the Neanderthals.

It is now believed that Cro-Magnon Man and the Neanderthals were forced into one another’s territories by shrinking resources in an age of extreme cold, and that they may have even crossed paths with some regularity.  In fact, many scientists argue that the Neanderthals may not have died out completely.  They suggest that a small number of them acculturated and mated into Cro-Magnon populations as their less-adaptive kin died off because of their inability to learn the more sophisticated methods of communication and cooperation that defined Cro-Magnon Man.  Community made the difference.

Humans survived extraordinary odds, dangerous and terrible animals, extreme temperatures, and thousands upon thousands of years to evolve to the top of the food chain and the master of his realm because he was thinking, courageous, and calculating.  In the end, however, the thing that set us apart even from similar and familiar versions of ourselves was our ability to function in a community and to apply the strengths of this arrangement to our environment.  Community is the thing that saved us from extinction and that will continue to hold us together when all else fails.

In today’s society, absorbed with our own schedules, focused on our own families, and overwhelmed by the sheer size of our population, we have turned away from our sense of community.  Sure, there are exceptions to this.  Perhaps, we attend the neighbor’s holiday party; we chat with the other parents on the sidelines of soccer practice; we even exchange pleasantries with the mail carrier and the clerk at the grocery store, but we lack real connection and interaction with those around us.  In the event of a serious and widespread emergency, we would see most of the people in our community as potential threats to our security and the safety of our family, not as fellow humans with whom we can exchange resources and rely on for increased chances of survival.

Perhaps this is the natural consequence of a population that has simply rocketed beyond reasonable, or perhaps this is a modern social conditioning intended to realign the human loyalty to things instead of people.  Our market lifestyle sees resources as acquisitions available for purchase at an ever-increasing number of locations while they simultaneously become more difficult to obtain in any other fashion.  While we gear ourselves at break-neck speed toward a culture of technology and consumption, the market providers slowly hoard production resources and bloat their already swollen control over our basic necessities.

With profit margins the sole focus, they raise the price of everything from water to furniture, forcing us to commit more time and energy to earning the money we need so we can meet the increasing financial demands.  Driven by basic survival instinct, we put our shoulder to the grindstone, working longer hours, forgoing community activities, skipping vacations, and finally handing over our children to a new and highly lucrative daycare industry just to put them somewhere “safe” so we can apply both adults in our household to the duty of earning income and acquiring resources.

We have become slaves to a system that intentionally divides us, that breaks down the final piece of our human identity, and that robs us of our community as well as our families.  We struggle to keep our heads above the waterline.  For some, that line is as simple as heat and food.  For others, it is a McMansion and a luxury SUV.  In either case, we are all still slaves.

In looking at our own American history of slavery, we know that the last thing slave owners wanted was for their slaves to feel a sense of community.  It is why they broke up families, disallowed mothers from raising their own children even if they belonged to the same master, and refused slaves the rights of marriage and familial identification.  It is why slaves were whipped for singing in the fields, prohibited from socializing during their few non-working hours, and conditioned to fear the consequences of collaboration on anything other than focused, productive labor.  By stripping slaves of their community, slave owners could reduce the chance of uprising, increase productivity, and wield a psychological control over their subservient that was far more powerful a message than any number of stinging lashes.

Our society has become a modern interpretation of the vulgar and deranged human condition of slavery.  We have syphoned off every possible excess, trimmed every non-essential, and whittled down our existence to “making time for my family.”  Meanwhile, the market machine turns, gobbling up not only our tangible resources but our human ones as well.

In a crisis situation, according to the Doomsday preppers, you need weapons to ward off people who will try to invade your property and steal your resources.  All I can think is, “Yes, but what if he possesses a skill or knowledge you do not?  What if he has access to something you require?  Do you shoot first and ask questions later?  Or do you address this human and then put one between his eyes if he isn’t useful to you?  And how long do you think you can survive like that?  No doubt your tune will change when you run out of ammo.  What if you have to leave your space and look for help?  Is your survival instinct going to be so appreciated when someone else is shooting at you?”

Maybe instead of hoarding supplies and weapons, and worrying about the legions of animals that will surely become of some people in a crisis, we should be working on reuniting our families, rebuilding our communities, and pushing back against the slave drivers that intend to keep us apart.  Maybe we should be singing in the fields… or in the case of modern times, marching in the streets.  Oh, wait, that’s right!  We are!  Well then, I guess we better invite the neighbors… and by neighbors, I mean, everyone.

Open Wide

/ JillArcangela / 5 Comments

There are a thousand reasons to Occupy.  Some are purely economic.  Others center on human rights and social justice.  Then there are the reasons that focus on the quality of life we are able to live in a world of over-industrialization.  Capitalizing on the basic human need for survival, corporations have driven our most fundamental necessities and basic creature comforts into the toilet in the name of profit.  Everything from blankets to body wash, beef to bottled water have entered the new market format in some hardly recognizable, bastardized version of its former self, spreading disease, widening the income gap, and “brand-washing” the human mind.  None of these realities leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as industrial food.

If you know me personally, you know how seriously I take food.  My small household (which includes me, my husband – reformed from a Coco-Puff childhood, and my 2-year-old who rejects cookies but will clear a table of fruit and hummus in seconds flat) emphasizes food and eating not as a part of life but as a way of life.  We have dedicated every inch of soil in our itty-bitty yard to our garden and line our driveway with potted veggies.  What we can’t grow for ourselves, we walk to our farmers’ market for.  We order eggs, meats, and dairy items from those farmers all winter.  Even our bread comes from a local orchard and bakery that procures local, sustainable flours.  And, when basic geography stands between us and food, we investigate the origin and company history of every item we buy before it goes on the grocery list.  We understand that eating real food, “slow food,” non-industrial food is essential to our life and wellness, but eating sustainably raised food is also critical to the health and vitality of our economy, our nation, and our planet.

This week, one of our favorite farms, run by an Amish family in Lancaster County, closed for business.  The loss of this farm is tremendous to my family and the countless others it served.  The farmer and his family proudly and meticulously raised meat, eggs, and dairy items from their beautiful and relatively small acreage.  The animals were treated with dignity and respect.  They were given room to roam, kept outside (weather permitting), and were never given “feed.”  Instead, they foraged or grazed upon the green hillsides that sloped gently toward a collection of impeccable buildings used for housing, milking, slaughtering, and so forth.  The family even hosted picnics for their buyers and gave them tours of the property, promoting a connection between suburbia and its food source, between farmer and consumer.  It was an amazing place run by amazing people.

The farm did not close for financial reasons, health code infractions, or even safety concerns.  It closed because the farmer could no longer withstand the political pressures levied against it by agencies that are attempting to squeeze the life (and money) out of the slow-food movement.  After a two-year FDA investigation of a Maryland buyers’ collective that was obtaining raw milk from over state lines (from 20 miles away to be exact), the farmer was named as being one of many who supplied the collective with the milk which – in the great state of Maryland – is considered contraband.  No need to reread that.  I did indeed say that raw milk is contraband in Maryland.

Keeping in mind that the law is the law, even if the law is completely ridiculous, it still does not strike me as an offense that should cost a man his farm – or the taxpayers a two-year investigation culminating in armed raids.  What is so dangerous about unpasteurized milk that requires it being seized by government officials and the home of a farmer, his wife, and their seven children should be raided by men with black boots and semi-automatic weapons?

It isn’t the milk, at all actually.  Milk, as with almost everything edible, can safely be consumed raw if eaten in a timely enough fashion.  Many cultures eat raw meats, organs, and other animal products.  If fact, older hunting traditions in many parts of the world still call for the heart of an animal to be cut out and eaten while the animal is still warm.  The hunters eat it, love it, and live to tell.  Despite incontrovertible evidence that raw milk is safe for human consumption if kept correctly, our government attempts to limit access of this item, among others, to the public market, and it doesn’t take much digging to understand why.

Slow-food (sustainably grown, locally sourced, unprocessed food) is a growing movement in America.  Our years of blind consumption are catching up to us, made evident by the sharp rise in disease, obesity, and physical/mental disorders in both children and adults.  Simultaneously, the rising cost of healthcare pinches our pockets, forcing us to seek out cheaper food sources, and sending us deeper into the cyclical problem.  Driven by an instinctual self-preservation, an increasing number of people are beginning to look at and speak out about the garbage dump that has become of the American dinner table.

With only a handful of corporations controlling the vast majority of food production in the U.S., easily discernible patterns of abuse and mishandling begin to emerge.  Like recipes for disaster, corporations have invented an infinite number of ways to make food play on our bodies’ weaknesses, fueling our inherent biological craving for fat and satiating every urge ten times over.

They have managed to make food inexpensive to produce by bulking it up with highly processed and extremely cheap ingredients like the “meals,” “syrups,” and “oils” of corn and soy, crops that can be farmed on massive scales by an increasingly industrialized agricultural system.  Conversely, because they control such large portions of the market, they are able to sell this despicably cheap food at incredibly low prices, “helping” families who are struggling to make ends meet.  Heck, if you stay loyal to scanning the mid-week, mailbox junk pile, you can probably even clip yourself a coupon.  But what are we really getting in return for our $1.99?

Sick; and we are getting sicker by the generation.  We are trading our physical health and the health of our planet for brand loyalty and disconnection for the fragile system that feeds us.  While Americans toss their carts full of colorful boxes containing mostly things they can’t identify or even pronounce, the small farms and food systems that have supported humans for millennia are rotting.

Meanwhile, political appointees sworn to uphold a fair, healthy, and honest food system are being selected from the insider’s network of pigs and criminals that we are also suddenly all too aware of.  In fact, the man currently heading the FDA’s food policy department (writing the laws that “protect” American consumers from unsafe foods and food handling) is Michael R. Taylor, formerly one of Monsanto’s most successful lobbyists.  With agendas that aim not to protect the food supply but to exploit it, we tack our grocery list to the laundry list of corporate corrupted, politically manipulated systems spinning wildly out of control.

As a result of these corrupt food systems, farmers find themselves in the crosshairs, but not for distributing contaminated products, poisoning consumers with gross mishandling, polluting or exploiting natural resources near their farms, or even manipulating food products to the point of unhealthy for consumption (all things the industrial food systems does regularly).  They find themselves coming under fire for supporting simple, timeless ideologies about freedom and food going hand-in-hand, for rejecting participation in a food system that is ultimately unhealthy and destructive to all things earthly, and for promoting the idea that food can come from outside the market system.

Though my Amish friend may have chosen, no doubt for the safety of his family, to take himself out of the line of fire, there are thousands of farmers willing to stand and fight.  They fire up their tractors, day in and day out, in willful dissent of the developing status quo.  They sow the seeds of change, of resistance, of tomorrow, and occasionally even of broccoli.  Every time you walk into a grocery store, looking at mountainous heaps of colorful and grotesquely oversized fruits and veggies and examining beef that comes from a place you have never even thought about, remember these warriors in overalls.  They are plowing for your health, your economy, your future, and the future of our planet.

It is high time to Occupy more than our streets.  We need to Occupy our fields as well.  Now, go hug a farmer.

Worker Bees

/ JillArcangela / 7 Comments

It has long been said that ignorance is bliss and that what we don’t know won’t hurt us.  I’m not sure when or why such nonsense was concocted, but the propagation of these ideas stands at the center of human idiocy and today’s political strategies.  What’s more, the modern political-corporate agenda seeks to push stupidity and misinformation as a means of human and societal control.  It is a war on reason, and they are setting up base camps in our schools.

Before I was a full-time mother (and part-time blogger), I was a teacher in the public school system.  During my education and its subsequent professional years, I worked in every setting imaginable.  I deflected racial tensions and flying chairs in a north Philadelphia elementary school and enjoyed the finely tuned middle schools of the Mainline.  I taught in daycare, general education, Autistic Support, remedial Reading, and Gifted settings.  From English to Math to Drama Club, I’ve worked with kids from ages two to eighteen.  I have three degrees and numerous educational merits.  The most important thing I ever learned, however, was how our easily and cleanly our public educational system has been hijacked.

In 1994, the No Child Left Behind Act was signed, forcing a uniformity on education that is essentially unreasonable to the basic diversity of the American landscape and strapping schools with financial weights they struggle to bear.  Its recent reauthorization was lobbied for more than $22 million, and those pushing for it range from chemical companies to the Chamber of Commerce.  In fact, the only ones pushing against it were the parents and teachers.

In the few short years between college and parenthood (my “hiatus”), I have watched public education fall prey to the manipulations of corporations.  Like vultures hopping madly around a fresh carcass, corporations have poached the system for weaknesses and points of entry.  Ironically, though not accidentally, the most vulnerable place for schools is in the budget.  The mandating of standardized testing costs schools thousands of dollars in materials, preparation, and implementation, but with repeated cutbacks to their funding by the very agencies that require the costly tests, schools struggle to make up the difference.  Desperate to make ends meet, they turn to the vultures – willingly opening their veins in exchange handouts to help keep schools open and safe.

Like a Hollywood villain capitalizing on his victim’s “misfortune,” the very proponents of the rigid and fundamentally flawed standards reach charitably into their pockets, donating everything from lunchroom edibles to classroom read-ables.  These gifts, however, come at a price.

With the increasing and steady influx of corporate “donations” to public education, schools become the new frontier for corporate manipulation.  The quality of education our children receive is suffering, and the commercial messages they get are gaining frequency and potency.  Cafeteria lines pass under televisions playing advertisements for every gadget imaginable, and programming is sponsored by Disney.  Math lessons divide Hershey’s candy bars.  Libraries are heavy with books about cartoon characters and boy bands while older texts of more legitimate content rot away.  One company, in the late 90’s, even went so far as to trade computers for a lesson about the “benefits of clear cutting forests.”

Slowly the principles of education erode, replaced by commercial messages, hidden agendas, and blatant misinformation.  As teachers struggle to maintain testing standards, which completely ignore the impacts of local culture, student diversity, and home-school relationships, they begin to pass up on lessons less likely to produce ScanTron results.  History, science, and the arts all take their turns on the chopping block as students practice reading and rereading paragraph long passages from test sample packs.  Students with special needs are being told to stay home the day of the test, as there is no make-up date and no scoring adjustments that take their exceptionalities into account.  Skilled, trained teachers change their entire approach to education, throwing out beautiful, creative, powerful lesson plans to make way for the pre-fab curriculums enforced by administrations.  Students stress and struggle, spending hours in after-school tutoring working on their test-taking strategies, and walk into school shades of white and green on test day.

The standardized tests and the weight put on them have, in fact, changed the entire scope and focus of education in America.  The aim is no longer to hone critical thinking and nourish creative minds, to inspire children to see their world through their own open eyes, to encourage educated and active participation in the world, or even to provide them with a set of skills they can take forward into a career.  It isn’t about teaching exploration, examination, analysis, construction, and design.  Suddenly, the entire objective is to “pass the test,” a test – mind you – that focuses solely on the most basic reading and lower math skills.

The decimation of America’s schools is about more than opening target markets and pumping children full of brand-loyalty and grade D beef.  There is a larger, more malicious agenda at play.  It is what I refer to as my “worker bee” theory.

If anyone was still teaching science, we would spend time learning about the bees (and why they are going extinct – which is probably why Monsanto has their lobby dollars involved in NCLB).  Bees have one purpose in life: to reproduce.  To do this, they gather pollen, turn it into honey, and feed that honey to their young.  They do not venture out for a leisurely fly.  They do not deviate from the explicit directions wiggled fervently to them by their co-workers.  They don’t even actually stop to smell the flowers.  They fly, collect, produce, and die.  By way of extensive political manipulation, corporations are slowly turning our schools into hives and our citizens into narrow-minded, singularly oriented worker bees.

Through the manipulation of our public education system, corporations have found a way not only to begin early programming but to limit the potential of the human mind for the purpose of driving society deeper into the abyss of market servitude.

We simply need to pay closer attention to our schools.

Oh, and for crying out loud, pizza is not a vegetable.  I know it has tomato sauce on it, but tomatoes aren’t vegetables either.  They are fruits… something else we would know if we were still teaching science.