In Defense Of Free Thinking In A 99% Democracy: How Not To Be A Cow

I have been thinking about the Arab Spring, particularly the Egyptian people. They face the challenge of becoming a democracy, and they’ve had little practice. They’ve been bearing the weight of the will of one man, virtually absolute in his power for over 40 years, and quite suddenly everything is fluid, relative, an on-going dialogue of compromise that hopefully makes most people happy most of the time. Do they know that if they as individuals are absolute in their own opinions that they’ll never come to such a healthy majority? That if they can’t stop and listen to people they don’t agree with, who’s views they may even find repugnant or morally offensive — the same people who cheered and died along side them last winter — that they are doomed to fail?

Enter Occupy Wall Street. The media would have you believe that the protester are so disorganized they are a non-event. As if to suggest that if you don’t have a manifesto, slogans that are easy to sound-bite and a neatly organized political faction, that you don’t matter. Occupy Wall Street is a nuisance for New Yorkers, and I am grateful for it.

These occupiers remind us that you don’t need a neat reason to express your messy frustration. In a 99% Democracy, you can disagree with everyone and anyone, without being shot at, and it’s as beautiful as a February night of Egyptians cheering in the streets, (for what they probably weren’t entirely sure). The occupiers take the conversation out of the box, your tablet, laptop, smart-phone, mail box, where it stands a small chance of not being corrupted, manipulated or abused — where not all the questions have immediate, short, simple answers.

When I read in the box, I get tired. Everything is colored red or blue. The speculation about their motivation is presented as ‘for’ or ‘against’, ‘red’ or ‘blue’, like everything else that might warrant a serious conversation. I can’t even make a quip on Facebook without it being colored beyond recognition. And when I myself, make the lazy habit of snapping to one color or the other, I am fortunes fool. My coloring is monitored, cataloged — at the voting booth, in search engines, credit card statements, social media routines, street video and I shudder to think more. We are all watched, and the lines of voting districts are quietly redrawn, over and over, to make each piece on the map neatly red or blue. Be advised that they do control us, not like an Egyptian dictator exactly, not in the Orwellian sense, not with guns – though they do use fear – but mostly the 1% and their cronies just watch and do the math. They need only try till they have 51%. So a national election can easily come down to one district and one issue – say prescription drugs – and we are enslaved by our own bovine predictability.

There is a scene in the Matrix. (Gotcha --- have you labeled me a sci-fi geek? Maybe you already labeled this article a color? See if you can notice how often you do that in a day. Do you label yourself? Do those labels serve you? Represent you accurately?). Keanu and company meet Lucifer in a restaurant. The Devil is fabulously dressed and surrounded by crapulent excess on elegant linens. He tells Neo, in so many words, that humans are pathetic because we are enslaved to a pendulum of casualty, doomed to react and react, ineffectually after the fact, with tedious predictability. Cause/effect, attachment/aversion, love/hate, red/blue, red/blue, red/blue.

I imagine that this group of people sleeping in the park downtown are desperately trying to tell us that the gaping chasm between the 99% and the unbelievably, disgustingly, ultra-wealthy has become a weight that the bottom can no longer bear. They want things to be fair. They know they don’t need the media’s approval, or a catchy slogan, or any idea of how to make things fair, or too many ideas of how to make things fair, to exercise their rights, and they think highly enough of us all to try (well, 99% of us).

Since I don’t know first hand what Occupy Wall Street wants or means, I am going to do the logical thing and go down there and ask, and (gasp) I might disagree with more than a few of them, but I am going to listen. It might be a first step nessessary to create the conditions for a real solution — one that has no color. More likely it will be a first step toward not being such a Capitalist tool, a slave to my own habits, an oblivious fetus-drone with a gigantic cord plugged into my spine, and I invite you to do the same. I invite you to re-enter your Democracy. Go listen to something that might make you uncomfortable, that isn’t in your preferences, your feed, your front doormat, your number on the dial — and instead, go talk to a free human and then think about it independently. You might be OK with 99% of it.

Then thank America that you can.