by Oh, my. Look what happened yesterday while I was puttering about and being self-absorbed:
Updated, 11:59 a.m. Sunday | In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.
and from the horse’s mouth:
Posted Oct. 1, 2011, 4:56 p.m. EST
Police have kettled the march on the Brooklyn Bridge and have begun arresting protesters. At least 20 arrested so far.
Since then, I have mellowed somewhat (or completely sold out, depending on who you ask). I’m not sure exactly how it happened (the story of my life)–fatigue, perhaps, and the fact that I could never see that the protesting actually changed anything. The self-congratulatory vibe at the protests started to gall me–it seemed to me that a lot of people were having way too much fun. The drums, the rock concerts, the paper-mache puppets. Liberals making serious comparisons, completely without irony, of the USA and Nazi Germany. (I mean, come on–I despised that president with the passion of a thousand suns–but Nazi Germany? REALLY? If yhou think that, I have some BOOKS you can read. And See Matt Taibbi’s article “A March to Irrelevance.” He nails it, as usual.)
Add to that the handful of other personal reasons that caused my life to jump the track in the last few years, and there you go.
I don’t believe that street protest contributes much of anything anymore. At least, not within this context. The State is largely immune to individual or group action like this. Bomb-throwers don’t accomplish much. You have to be a bomb-maker.
But from a personal and ethical standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether the protests cause anything to happen. The fact is: if the cause is just, then it is right and necessary to protest. The act of protesting is righteous in and of itself.
I don’t think that I have any local readers–nobody in any of my regular lives knows that I blog–but if I do, by all means, come to the protest tonight. I’ve traded in my romper stompers for Prussian army boots, but I will be there. It’s the least I can do.
P.S. Sorry about the font changes. Still learning blogger.
P.P.S. If you’re not using Google Chrome as your web browser, I want you to go download it right now. Be kind to yourself. Life is too short for bad browsers, especially Internet Explorer (Microsucks Unexplorer). Trust me on this. I suffered with Microsucks Unexplorer for practically all of my adult life, just because I have an irrational fear and hatred of technology. When it comes to computers, I am like a crabby old lady. Upgrade? Why upgrade? I’m comfortable with the one I have, thank you! If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it! It’s embarrassing. Anyway, my friend finally got me to switch to Firefox and I never looked back until last week, when I upgraded to the newest version, which doesn’t support the google taskbar. That was just totally unacceptable to me. A deal-breaker. Miss Margo loves her some Google and Google Scholar. Yahoo!’s search engine sucks bigtime. So I tried Chrome. CHROME, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?! Do don’t be like me. Go get chrome. It’s easy, I swear to god. I did it in 90 seconds. Totally improved my quality of life (because that is what I need for personal growth and happiness…MORE INTERNET.).
