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I'm sorry, I support many of the messages they're sending, but walking out of an educational institution you're paying an arm and a leg to be at is not one of them.
Tis’ the Halloween season. Be afraid, very afraid. Eric Cantor, Orrin Hatch, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mitt Romney, and Herman Cain want you to be very afraid of the Occupy Wall Street movement. These politicians and pundits have variously pronounced the OWS participants “badly educated,” riot-provoking, “dirty,” “lazy,” a “mob,” “anarchists,” “parasites,” “Marxists” and “human debris.”
Fox and friends accused them of being “drug addicts.” Glenn Beck warned, “They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill us.” Well, I intend to join this “mob of parasites” and soon-to-be-violent “killers.”
This is how scary I am:
I’m a “drug addict,” even though I’ve never used drugs, never had a drink of alcohol and never smoked cigarettes or pot.
Despite my “laziness,” I have a job, work about 55 hours a week, plus 20 more hours for a non-profit, unpaid.
Despite being a “parasite,” I make enough money that I want the government to raise my taxes. I’m “badly educated,” despite having advanced degrees, spending the last 37 years studying medical science.
Despite my wanting to “drag you out into the street and kill you,” I’ve spent many nights during those 37 years helping drag some of you from the streets, providing life-saving care for victims of car accidents and gun shots, often without pay.
Despite being “human debris,” according to Limbaugh, I’ve managed to stay married to the same person for 40 years (three fewer marriages than Rush) and I’ve not only never been addicted to oxycontin, Rush, I’ve never taken a single pill.
Despite being an “anarchist,” my only experience with mob violence was to try and quell it.
So what makes millions of people like me so threatening to Sen. Hatch, who hates the message and is worried that most people actually agree with it. So naturally, kill the messengers and the “Occupy Wall Street” message you can’t abide.
Our government has become paralyzed. Our most serious problems not only remain unsolved, but steadily intensify — intractable unemployment, massive debt, failing public education, crumbling infrastructure, counterproductive wars, unaffordable health care, an immoral disparity in wealth, oil addiction, environmental degradation, and the grandaddy of them all, an apocalyptic climate crisis that’s just getting started.
The common denominator is an electoral system so dependent on obscene amounts of money that the public interest always loses to the special interests, just like the Washington Generals always lose to the Harlem Globetrotters. The refs (lawmakers) are bought off.
Where’s our clean-energy future? Sitting hog-tied with our scientists in the back of the bus while TransCanada, Peabody Coal and Exxon Mobile stomp on the accelerator, hurtling all of us off the cliff of climate disaster.
Single-payer health care? Won’t happen, not because the public doesn’t want it, but because the insurance industry, with its army of lobbyists, won’t stand for it.
Banks bailed out with your tax money? Sure. Individual mortgage holders? Not a chance. Reform of rigged, casino capitalism that just ruined the world’s economy? Nope. Prosecution of the perpetrators of Wall Street theft and fraud? Ain’t gonna happen.
Thanks to five radical right-wing members of the Supreme Court, corporations and their beneficiaries have tightened their death grip on our government and the democratic process and are drowning it in the bathtub, heeding the perennial cry of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.
This is what Occupy Wall Street is all about. It is the definitive struggle for the soul of the country, the literal future for our children and grandchildren and the 99 percent of the world’s population who can’t buy themselves a fortress impermeable to the economic and environmental carnage transpiring before our eyes.
The OWS demonstrators are as interested in accountability as the tea party, but want it applied to corporations and the top 1 percent, not just the bottom 99 percent. They understand that the solution is not less government, but better government, where the refs aren’t bought off, where you and I have as much of a voice as the $45 billion Koch brothers, andwhere thieves who steal billions of dollars from millions of people don’t get golden parachutes, but actually go to jail.
Brian Moench is a physician and public health advocate. He lives in Salt Lake City.
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