OCCUPYING CAPITALISM

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Going into this winter has been a mild approach. It's almost Christmas and yesterday was in the 60s and today is predicted to be the same, plus rain. After the rain, a wave of cold will come in. I like the mild temperatures, because the house uses less heat. It almost makes me miss the years of gathering firewood in the fall, carrying wood to the house a few times a day, keeping the fire going. Now I use a kerosene Monitor. Kerosene costs more than gasoline, and it used to cost less, before so many people started needing it for heat. I can't help but be interested in changes going on in the Occupy movement. It's a classic American situation where a large group of people under one form of oppression or another are making a demonstration to draw attention to an imbalance that needs balancing. They are always ignored, beaten with clubs, handcuffed, treated like maximum security prisoners, taken to jail to get fingerprinted and entered into the computers, treated like criminals all the way around. Like in the Rolling Stones song, "Think I'll go down to the demonstration, get my fair share of abuse." It happens over and over, so much it's ongoing.



The part that interests me about the Occupy movement is it looks like the beginnings of the end of Capitalism. We're at a place in historical sequence of events that looks like it is time for Capitalism to implode of its own excesses, as Karl Marx saw it a century and a half ago. If we're to have a thousand years of peace, as the Bible prophecies foretell, we can't have peace in Capitalism. It's not possible. The word communism has been ruined by the Russians and Chinese, whose regimes are not communist. True communism follows the imploding of capitalism. It's what comes after capitalism in the natural social evolution. I just now had a good laugh at all these loaded words I'm using in one paragraph; communism, evolution, Karl Marx. Each one of them makes the average American shudder, because nobody ever uses them. They are the forbidden words. To say evolution is every bit as reprehensible as saying pussy. It's not that anybody knows the meanings of these words, just that they're the words it's against the rules to use. Bad. Not good.



In Victor Hugo's story, Les Miserables, on film the Liam Neeson version directed by Bille August, the man wearing black, obsessed with destroying the Neeson character's life, at the end admitted he never broke a rule, and fell backwards into the river after handcuffing himself. The man of the straight and narrow, law and order, the one who dots his i's and crosses his t's, enforcer of the rules, stood in opposition to a Jesus kind of character, Jean Valjean, who helped the poor and did not pass judgment. The man in the black cloak represented the forces of civilization that demand our attention and take our life away from us, like the vampires popular on tv today. He leaves us to die of pneumonia in the cold and wet, makes us into zombies, the living dead. One of Hugo's great themes in this story was really a look at ourselves as Christian people, such that when somebody exhibits Christian behavior, he becomes an outcast. Christ-like behavior might work for awhile in a rural community, but not in an urban setting, unless hidden.



The difficult part of living under Capitalism is that it's god is Mammon, a god indifferent to human beings except as expendable commodities. It's only interest is money. The USA is not a Christian nation at all, but Mammonite. Everybody wants more money. Everybody wants to be successful in the money game. Everybody wants to win the lottery. Everybody wants to live high on the hog. Nobody wants to help the poor. It's their fault they're poor. Fuck em. Get a job. Capitalism was the same in 19th Century Paris as it is in USA today. Your money or your life. Money is power, money is beauty, money is sexy, money is important, money is existence. Isn't there something that runs through all scriptures about putting your faith in false gods? The United States of America doesn't act like Mammon is a false god. The television evangelists certainly don't act like it.



I can't help but imagine the worst watching Capitalism implode of its own excesses. The excesses have come to the point that "we the people" are without hope, a mountain of debt on your back for an education that will get you a minimum wage job at Home Depot. Just another brick in the wall. What I see next is how the American people take to corporate indifference going after that last drop of blood, the last fish in the sea. Even though the history we get in school has little relation to what really happened, all Americans have revolution taught to us even if we didn't watch tv. Our government is so quickly becoming our enemy, by regarding us the enemy first, that it unsettles me to imagine where this is going. And we're going so fast in that direction, it won't be long getting here, wherever it is. Hate is boiling up like crazy on the side of the Right Wing, the flames fanned by the Windbag of the Airwaves and the like, in memory of the Gypper. I pray that the transition be gentle.

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