There are no excuses left.
Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial
districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of
history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil
disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and
accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or
become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and
smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair
and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
To be declared innocent in a
country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a
corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to
joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal
surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus
no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to
corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in
this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear
the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the
oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like
these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim
DeChristopher.
Choose. But choose fast. The
state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to
wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long
phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their
foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange
plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street
leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks
Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate
and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend
on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators
were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They
disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than
you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system
is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic
class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live
in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of
their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year
go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from
lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent,
where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage,
working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of
masters and serfs. Protesters march past Federal Hall on Wall Street on Monday.
The only word these
corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last
social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social
Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the
poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot.
Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in
misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects
of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to
swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers,
police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the
unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines,
subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising
temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the
droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned
water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.
Who the hell cares? If the
stocks of Exxon-Mobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is
good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal
barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them
off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem,
dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too
blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up
and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of
sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the
demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are
frog-marched toward self-annihilation.
Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER,
a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with
Occupy Wall St.
© 2011 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a
regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle.
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