Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes — Thomas Jefferson
Actions speak louder than words.
When the NYPD donned full riot gear then stormed the encampment at Zuccotti Park, this confirmed beyond doubt that the powers and principalities do in actuality believe Occupy Wall Street to present a clear and present danger to their regime.
Millionaires are right to fear for their privilege. Occupy Wall Street does, in fact, represent a mortal threat to the dominant order. This movement—which has no leaders and which issues no specific demands—is so dangerous to the vested interests precisely because its members refuse to negotiate with them within existing institutions. Instead people are spontaneously coming together to form their own alternative system of governance, establishing General Assemblies where grievances may be heard and decisions made openly and democratically. For citizens accustomed to being excluded from the halls of power, having a voice that is actually heard is a liberating tonic.
What could be more threatening to plutocrats or their sniveling sycophants?
The founders of the American republic never deluded themselves into believing the conceit that they had established a perfect union. Instead they recognized that the most they could bequeath was “a more perfect union” that would require eternal vigilance and no small measure of sacrifice to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
These blessings were never intended to be restricted to the purview of the richest few amongst us; the fact that wealth and power have become so concentrated, with laws and regulations radically skewed in favor of the rich, indicates that the institutions our fathers left to our care must be fundamentally flawed. Thomas Jefferson, the one founder who did not participate in our Constitutional Convention because he was busy serving his country as its ambassador to France, later diagnosed where his compatriots had erred: the constitution made no provision for local government, where citizen participation might be rendered. For only by electing representatives in town hall meetings can true democratic representation be secured. Otherwise so-called representatives must represent those who secure for them their office: the moneyed interests who finance their electoral campaigns.
This bears repeating: if representatives are not chosen by people who know them because they work alongside them administering local government, these elected representatives can only represent those persons and companies that gain access for them to the mass media. This, in a nutshell, is the origin of the crisis. Do you know your Congressperson? More important, does he or she know you?
How can anyone represent you if they don’t know you?
But Jefferson goes further. Madison and the other conventioneers believed that Liberty might be preserved through an elaborate and highly-redundant system of checks-and-balances, where competing self-interest would restrain the few from taking advantage of the many, regardless of the character of the people involved. Jefferson, to the contrary, thought good government required well-intentioned, well-educated and well-informed citizens. If anything was to preserve the republic, it was not constitutional checks-and-balances, but the revolutionary spirit of men and women. It's the constitution of people that matters!
Which is why Occupy Wall Street is so dangerous and so necessary: the constitution of words is being overwritten by the constitution of people—women and men brave enough to reclaim that which is rightly theirs: their country.
