Focus

The 99% don't have answers, but we need to be asking the right questions. Among the many goals shared to varying degrees is an end to apathy. So what do you say to a typical American to convince them that they should care?

Imagine that you are an East Texan living in a small town relatively unaffected by the recession. Good standard of living thanks to low cost of living and plentiful economic resources, i.e. fertile land sitting on top of an oil field. Heavily Christian, solidly Republican. We're talking steer, oil, guns, and football. Half the people you meet tell you within a minute how many tours their son or daughter did recently in Iraq or Afghanistan.

How are these people victims of corporate domination in politics and the media, perpetual foreign war for profit, and the enormous government sponsored concentration of wealth in the top 1%? What do they lose? What do they have to gain if any of that changes?

Let's start with foreign wars. Their kids are dying. Isn't that enough to get any parent out on the street, occupying the nearest major city demanding that the troops come home?

Unfortunately no, for at least a couple of reasons. Families are rightly proud of their service men and women. They are also laboring under the delusion that the wars are just and necessary for our security. This is tied back to media. In terms of emotional manipulation and misinformation, the damage is done.

Perhaps a more fruitful avenue for discussion might be the defense butget. If it's not enough that we're destroying thousands of lives with no tangible benefit, perhaps it will get them in the streets to think about the fact that we are literally blowing up billions of dollars. These are dollars we can ill afford to spend with our budget problems.

Corporate legislation and taxes might be approached the same way. Maybe it's too much to hope for, but in a town built by 'independent oil men', the idea that corporations have a first obligation to working families, then to the social and environmental health of communities, before they are allowed unchecked spending on frivolous luxury and politics, just might stick. Let's allow our corporations to pay no taxes when they create and sustain living wage jobs, and bleed them dry on tax penalties for polution, outsourcing, buying private jets and, worst of all, ad campaigns.

Okay, enough blathering. To the point. You, well off Mr. Smith, have the financial health of the government to worry about. There are economic consequences in your town when healthy wage jobs become fewer and farther between, even if you happen to have one.

And as a Christian, where is your sense of moral obligation in any of this? People are needlessly suffering. Blessed are the meek- blessed, then, are the 99%, who deserve a chance to speak up for themselves in meaningful ways.

I just might get a chance to put it to someone in East Texas. What if one of your independent oil men...

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