Occupy Chicago's rag tag band in the rain

Rain is hard in Chicago. It is a brooding dark city in the South loop anyway and when it rains in October and the people have gone away then you really feel that old Nelson Algren metropolis that seems so much like Gotham. Maybe it's because Chicago is a northern city that has to get through the long winters. But South Loop has always been strange and deserted at night and Lasalle Street is even more deserted with the closed up CBOT and the giant pillars of the Federal Reserve. And then in all that rain and dreariness is a small group of people with soggy signs and plastic slickers. They stand there on one corner looking like homeless people: Occupy Chicago.

You can't beat them up too much. Protesting in the modern age like everything else is derivative. I remember the huge parade of people going down Michigan Avenue when the Iraq war broke out. The first one. A lone black man said to me we goin to war. And then they marched down Congress and that was a large protest, but they too were swallowed up by indifference. The war happened anyway. What is interesting is that the Occupy movement is pretty small or so it seems and they are getting media coverage. But this too is on a time limit.

My buddy and I huddled in the CBOT doorway out of the rain and watched the protester's. One woman held up a sign: WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT. A few people honked as they went by. The rain came down even harder. The rest of the protester's talked as if at a really bad concert waiting for the next band. Somebody hit a giant drum. But other than that there was just the marble edifices of modern finance and the small motley crew of people. A cop pulled up and sat in his car, staring at the ad hoc tent of plastic someone had set up over boxes. Hooverville of the Depression comes to mind.

And then there was really not much to do. We were in the middle of the night in the middle of  a rainstorm watching people get soaked with a few soggy signs. No change it would seem here. It was almost embarrassing to watch. Maybe all movements start like this but television certainly glamorizes because this was just small and dismal. So we moved on and found a bar.

It was a yuppie bar on Michigan Avenue with a strange feel of 1985 for yuppies. But no one had told these people the party was over. Men in suits and women in designer dresses. Martinis all around. A wealthy man with long grey hair just down the bar. We order up and sit among the if not one percent then certainly the up and coming ten percent. Who knows. We were a long way from that ragged band of soaked people on a street corner.

So it is with all revolutions.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Sixties are back in The Teens

Was a kid during the sixties but I picked up the vibes and they are the same. The squares thought they could do an end run under the crummy guise of patriotism and fiscal responsibility and call themselves a name hearkening back to throwing tea into the Boston Harbor. Figure the left had gone to sleep and now look what has happened, we have a generational conflict mirroring the big push back of the counterculture in the sixties when Vietnam lit the fuse. Now it is pillaging of the American dream on a massive scale touching off the new powderkeg of populist discontent.

And it is the young again. The middle aged middle class people have too much to lose usually to go park it in New York or Chicago or LA. But if you read about the OWS movement and listen to the pundits calling them anti American or class warfare warriors or mobs or rabble rousers or just plain un-American you think all the way back to the bearded bums statements by many during the sixties. The students then were agitators or Communists or anarchists or socialists or agents of the Soviet Union. The college students to Nixon and company were nothing short of the enemy and Kent State proved the point.

And will we have another Kent State? The keg is being filled and you wonder who will touch it off. Will the police try and clear the park or will somebody call in the National Guard again. Who knows? But the lines are being drawn and it is lining up just like fifty years ago when one generation drew a line against another. And look what came out of that turbulence...our very culture.

We'll see this time what comes out of our new sixties which might well be called... the teens.
It fits doesn't it?

http://www.billhazelgrove/.

Rocket Man...one mans war against suburbia

The Pigs Will Have Their Day

Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. An old mortgage man said that to me a long time ago. The hogs it would seem are about to get slaughtered. You may laugh at the small size of these gatherings on Wall Street but you should start watching this. The middle class has been decimated and the children of the middle class have nowhere to go, but to the streets. And no one has been listening.

FDR saw this coming in the thirties. He knew that if inequities were not addressed then there would be trouble. So The New Deal emerged and he gave the middle class a piece of the pie. Now you have that pie divided into tiny slivers with the one percent taking the giant gulp. Should there be this type of inequality in society? This is the basic question of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Strip it down and it is about the removal of representation for the middle class. America is truly an oligarchy with only the wealthy represented in Washington. The Middle Class simply does not have a lobby to push their concerns. The middle class is not represented because there is no room at a table composed of bankers and corporations. So what is left for them but to take to the streets for those who have disenfranchised?

Dis-comfort. That is the opposite of comfort. The people in Washington are all comfortable. They have no dis-comfort. Demonstrations by their nature create dis-comfort. They shake up the status quo. There is no clear agenda and there are no leaders. But there will be dis-comfort as the protest grows. This is the age of social media and it could well spider out. And it would seem Washington will not see the writing on the wall until it comes to their door.

That old mortgage man went on to explain that if you take too much, if you are greedy, then you might end up getting nothing. Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Someone should write it down and send it to every person in Washington who has forgotten about who they really are supposed to represent.

Because the pigs will have their day.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...a story of one man trying to find the American Dream