In all honesty my first response is to think "what the hell is wrong with you? Can't you read? Don't you know what's going on around you?" But that reaction won't help anything, it will just escalate the conflict. The crazy thing is, there should be no conflict at all, to my mind at least. I watch, with a sense of incredulity, people who say things like that... its like watching a slave defend its master, or a serf stand up for its feudal lord, even as the same lord rides roughshod over the top of them.
When I saw the below cartoon, I felt physically ill. Its hard not to believe there is some kind of plot out there, because no one could be this ignorant... could they?
It certainly doesn't tell my story. It definitely enrages me.
This cartoon is representative of the overall problem. Someone else is telling the story, they have more money and more resources than the people they are defaming, and what they are telling is a lie. This cartoon sums the story they are telling up nicely, which, in a nutshell is this:
There are two kinds of people in this country. Hardworking, law abiding citizens who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, make a success of themselves, and have no complaints. They are good Americans. Then, there are the freeloaders. People who just want a handout, they are graspy, greedy, and in the end become dupes of crooked politicians. They hate America, and want to take away everything the hardworking Americans, people like YOU, have worked so hard to achieve. These people don't want to work, they want entitlements.
The story is spun so that the very people that OWS are out there trying like hell to represent are duped into believing they are the ones OWS wants a handout from. The 1% is removed from the picture, and the issue is percieved as a few freeloaders trying to rip off the rest of hardworking America.
It is frustrating, and its hard to compete with media that is telling the same story as this comic... over, and over, and over again. The media is telling our story using divide and conquer tactics. It is very hard to have a coherent movement that will accomplish anything when the real 99% is at each other's throats because they percieve each other as the enemy. We are severed along party lines and kept apart, and as a result we all lose, and the corporations and fat cats win and laugh all the way to the bank.
The only cure for it is that we have to get better at telling out own story. We need to make it clear why we are doing this. We need to talk about it, to our families, our friends, to total strangers... especially now when crack down after crack down is happening in every Occupy encampment across the country and the media is renewed in their efforts to portray us as nothing more than crazy, homeless, drug addled, criminal, radical, crackpot, and dismissable.
We cannot be dismissed.
Start a blog, make a flyer, write a letter to the editor, give a speech, speak out at every opportunity. Tell our story, tell YOUR story.
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