Occupy Seattle

I saw demonstrators with tents setup near Westlake Center holding signs saying, "Occupy Seattle" [1]. This morning I saw "Occupy Wall Street" spray-painted on a pillar by the river trail under 85th Street in Redmond. Tomorrow maybe we'll see something besides our own occupations.

I have to give these people some credit for at least recognizing what it takes to change systems: you don't work within them. Sometimes, though, you don't fix them either ... you just let them fall apart and build something else from the wreckage. I don't know that I've heard of any major system, governments or economics, that has evolved into something better. Things grow, they age, and they die. This is a tide law that everything obeys; "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." [2] That can be depressing or encouraging depending on what side of the system you're on. These people demonstrating; they're probably scared to lose the system they want to reform.

Everyone has some basic panacea to solve our "problems", but these are fantastically superficial; bits of fantasy left-over from Disney (a giant corporation) instilling values we don't live by in cartoon movies we watched as children. Take from the rich and give to the poor! Down with those rich, greedy CEO's! By the way, you're the mountain on which they stand so let's all take a bit of blame and throw some salt over our shoulders. Perhaps we're angry that someone is abusing our own lottery dreams, but they surfed the big waves of our own cultural decadence into tropical shores of avarice.

Why do we need more jobs? Why do we need to earn a living? Are we now entitled to other things besides life itself? The nominal count of jobs is a poor metric. What we need are food, shelter, and love ... not to mention a place to take a shit. What we want is the ability to provide for our families. What we crave is all the new trinkets from the very companies we're vying for employment at. This is a vicious circle. What is the 40 hour workweek or a steady job except consistency, safety, insurance? Freedom as the idealistic American dream is the opposition; our beloved stories trumpet one path and we operate by another. Patriotism may be about getting in line and complaining about cutters.

We're overgrown and clinging to overblown problems of our own design. Every cure heralds a new poison, every progress destroys some previous foundation, and every convenience leads to further atrophy, apathy, and acclimation to a non-existent reality.