The Free Press -- Independent News Media from Columbus, Ohio

The Free Press -- Independent News

The abandoned class: Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase?
by Robert C. Koehler
October 22, 2011

Will it find a voice to articulate not merely the pain of the struggling middle class but the endemic unfairness and racism of inescapable poverty? “Everyone is important,” read the sign of an elderly protester. My God, what if it were true? What if we could see, in the desperate thrashing of the abandoned class, everyone’s future, that of the 99 percent and that of the 1 percent?

Let the Occupy movement become such a merging of voices that it reaches and changes the rigged game of American democracy and puts the collective failure of the system, in all its manifestations — from environmental collapse to our doomed wars and the hubris of empire to the violence in our streets — at the forefront of our media and our consciousness. Let the movement be the first tremor of a new awareness that dehumanizes no one.

This awareness has been under construction for a long time. My guess is that I’m not the only one who keeps coming across ideas and idealists who seem to be part of the movement even if their focus is solely on a small, particular corner of the world they have devoted their lives to changing, and ostensibly has nothing to do with Wall Street or politics. Could it be that our solutions are converging?

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