Aww...this is sweet
10/18/2011
More than sweet, really. It's profound. (By the way, if you haven't seen any video from the Occupy rallies, the odd pause-and-echo thing is supposed to be a way of addressing a crowd without amplification--speaker says a phrase, pauses, crowd repeats it, and so on. I guess her bullhorn doesn't carry far enough.)
There's real grace operating here; I pray she follows it. I knew girls like this in the '60s. By the early '70s or so most of them were hard-edged feminists, lesbians, abortion rights activists, etc.
I saw this on your FB and liked it very much. Some of our students who are involved with the Catholic Worker are like that.
I didn't share it on FB for this reason. I wouldn't shout out abuse at such people or think anything bad about them. But I don't know how long I could have a polite conversation with them that was actually about the topic.
I can see why they are doing it - bankers bear a great responsibility for the financial mess of Europe and America, and they've been 'bailed out' whereas other people just lost their homes and jobs. But how could 'occupying' Wall Street actually change that?
Posted by: Res Ex | 10/19/2011 at 08:15 AM
Yep. I know that girl. Dye her hair brown and add about 20 pounds and that would have been me in 1969.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 10/19/2011 at 08:32 AM
I didn't think you were especially the activist type, Janet. Or do you just mean the general view of things?
I don't think they're very coherent at all, Res Ex, sort of like the Tea Partiers who want to cut everything except Social Security and Medicare. I'm pretty sure they don't understand much about how things actually work and even more sure that they wouldn't know how to fix it. The moment of silence for Steve Jobs at the NY one was indicative. But at the broadest level they definitely have a point. Things are pretty dysfunctional, and the middle class is shrinking. It's basically an emotional reaction, but with good reason.
This quiz is interesting. I did better than the average OWS person. And I was right on the last question, on which 94% (!!) of them were wrong.
Posted by: Mac | 10/19/2011 at 09:32 AM
More of a hanger-on than an activist, but this is just the kind of thing that I was always saying. I just thought if I loved people and we talked everything would work out. I didn't have any idea how hard it is to really love people, or how difficult it is to communicate even when we do love people. I'm sure I didn't have anything against the establishment, but the war made me miserable. I didn't care much about why they were fighting. I just didn't want to see boys my age killed and mutilated. I had done volunteer work in a VA hospital, so I had seen some of that.
And, you know, it was a good way to meet boys.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 10/19/2011 at 02:13 PM
I'm pretty sure I didn't think that deeply about love. But the war made me miserable for possibly even stronger reasons. Or at least more immediate. :-)
I hesitate to say this, for reasons that will be obvious, but it does seem that to be a person who started a war without extremely good reason would not be a condition in which one would want to face judgment.
Posted by: Mac | 10/19/2011 at 03:30 PM
By the way, I was being a bit mischievous in posting that vid on Fb. I have Fb "friends" on both right and left and was sort of hoping to provoke some kind of response--from the left for suggesting that OWS is funny, from the (Christian) right for suggesting there was something to learn from this person. Didn't get any.
Posted by: Mac | 10/19/2011 at 04:17 PM
I had two friends who posted this video--both Macs, btw--the other one said: This kind of irrational blathering reminds me of a woman who spoke on a (very excellent) book on loons she had written. In the middle of the talk she started crying, as she imagined the loons killed by nuclear war. Please...imagine reality.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 10/19/2011 at 05:22 PM
Ah well, maybe I'm just a sap.
I mean really, it would be sad if all the loons got killed by nuclear war, though not as sad as if all the mallards got killed.
Posted by: Mac | 10/19/2011 at 08:49 PM
I looked at the test and without checking the right answers could see I could only do two. But I don't offer anyone my opinions about economics.
Posted by: Res Ex | 10/19/2011 at 08:58 PM
True, Maclin.
I can't figure out how anyone could miss a couple of the answers on that test--the ones about Ben Bernanke and Elizabeth Warren in particular--because the wrong answers were so obviously wrong. I got the last one right, too. Who would ever get that from what you hear on the the news, though?
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 10/19/2011 at 09:15 PM
I mean true about the loons and mallards, not true about your being a sap, although you probably are a sap, which is okay sometimes.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 10/19/2011 at 09:17 PM
Yeah, I thought that was what you meant.
I had seen that about military vs SS etc spending before, but mostly from conservative sources, so I wondered if it was tilted in some way, but New York magazine is not exactly conservative.
Posted by: Mac | 10/19/2011 at 10:01 PM