SAN DIEGO — It seems that many are dismissive of the ‘Occupy’ movement that is proliferating in American cities and some foreign communities as well. It was described as “mobs” by at least one leading Congressman who derides the movement. Not. It’s an amalgam of socially disenfranchised low-income people, unemployed professionals, undervalued teachers, college students without hope, seniors robbed of their pensions.
In 1963, as another “mob” gathered in Washington for the March that included Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” preachment, a local white businessman was overheard saying: “All the monkeys are out today.” We dehumanize people who want a fair return on their hard work, who express moral outrage at the egregious disproportion of American prosperity, who crave dignity and a return on their trust in this country. When we turn our hearts away, and hoard our treasures and lump groups of serious citizens as “the other,” then we become as ethically bankrupt as the national debt is gaping.
When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor described the citizens who have gone into our streets to express their right of free speech as “mobs,” he only clarified the glaring discrepancy between the American elite and the rest of us, the troubling chasm between arrogance and compassion that has all but worn out the people’s belief in what our elected leadership is actually doing there in D.C.
The American Revolution was a collective gathering of will and pain. It is gilded by some of the politicians who have defaulted on their own leadership responsibilities, or even on the ability, or will to understand the society they serve. We’ve watched them bicker and carry on like grade school kids, just trying to out-box each other for partisan advantage, while US citizens lose their homes, their savings, their chance at some serenity in old age.
The arrest of Professor Cornel West in Washington this week—just after he attended the dedication of the MLK Memorial—is deeply troubling and ominous. An uncommonly literate and articulate teacher, a gifted spokesman of human history and angst, he was detained by police for trying to galvanize a demonstration against corporate influence and greed on the steps of the Supreme Court. [Thankfully, Dr. West will not face criminal charges.] The professor had joined the October 2011 “Stop the Machine” protest in Washington’s Freedom Plaza.
Ten years of agonizing warfare in Afghanistan, without any clear resolution, with the hemorrhaging of human lives, was what especially drove the protest that Dr. West joined. A spiraling economy, a precipitous decline in American educational, health, service, and social justice standards—all these have been sending common American citizens into the open air of our democratic heritage. This is a mob? This is normal behavior in a civilization that once admired civil disobedience.
On the last night of his life, April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his haunting “Mountaintop” speech. Early on in the address, he decried the inability of the authorities to tolerate the presence of American citizens in civil protest: “I’d understand if this was happening in China…but somewhere I read about the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read about the freedom of the press!”
These are no mobs, Hon. Rep. Cantor. These are the children of righteous anger.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com