Sticks and Stones

Do you remember as a kid 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me'? You don't have to watch too much of this to wonder what the fuqq the NYPD are afraid of. I've watched all of it and still cannot figure it out. Actually, what I cannot figure out is why the police, not just in NYC but everywhere, aren't joining those in the Occupy Movement and, instead, are inflicting real and serious physical pain on people exercising their constitutional rights of speech and assembly.

Catch this action at :12. Officer Krupke is getting in better licks than Tex and A-Rod did when the Tigers were in town the week before. I mean, we've transcended Protect and Serve and added Enjoy in what looks like null comma nichts. As kids we were raised to believe police were our friends-if you get in trouble, said Mom, find a policeman and he'll bring you home. I guess she meant, he'll drive it home.

A hyper-local news website (it's a national chain with both shared and unique content, this is the latter) provoked readers into suggesting those involved in Occupy Wall Street should undertake anatomically difficult endeavors in response to what they've been reading as if the world were fully in ordnung and the skies are not cloudy all day. The tone of many of the comments is who do these people think they are?

They don't think they are anyone. They know they are us, all of us or 99% of us. Why are you surprised? Who doesn't have, or know, a child who is a recent college graduate with huge student loans to repay and job prospects (not jobs) that will, even if they could work them all, ever allow them to make any inroads on those repayments for a decade or more.

Who has a bank that received a bailout during the Too Big to Fail Sale and used that money, borrowed from all of us, to loan out to businesses and private citizens in their local communities (or did they, instead, award themselves bonuses)?

Who doesn't have a neighbor, or isn't her/himself that neighbor, whose job (and career) has been OE'd (outsourced elsewhere) usually overseas? I know, it's competition and capitalism--tell that to this guy who'd been doing some serious reckoning-if you listen hard enough you can hear the cash registers trying, and failing, to drown him out.

We've been rolling and tumbling ass over tea kettles (Mom said it a lot; I never understood it until just now) since 2005 (plus/minus a year) and when I say ''we" I mean Middle Class people like myself. We didn't and don't have much but we had some-and the knowledge that a lot of people had it worse.

And because we didn't know, or we didn't care, or we were asleep or we were afraid, we did nothing and got nothing in return. Einstein noted a lifetime ago the fatal flaw of stasis, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” And yet, damn it, we keep trying to anyway.

For me, it's like a light has come on. I watched this start and wondered when it would end and what it would look like. Sort of figured at least that end part out, for now-this Saturday in Liberty Plaza. Not angry (at least not yet-don't know what'll happen if somebody other than a cheerleader uses a baton) but to bear witness that I and mine are here not by the grace of God or some corporate stooge at JP Morgan or AIG (Avarice, Ignorance and Greed) but because we, each have a right to be here-just as you do.

I'm tired of hoping something is left at the end of the day for me to take home to my family and you should be, too. It's not that we work too hard-it's that we work too hard to live on our knees begging for our lives with every breath we draw. Waiting for something to happen is all well and good, unless and until you've decided to be the something that is happening. Nothing can stop an idea or an ideal whose time has come. Synchronize watches.

-bill kenny