Sage Smudging Will Not Correct Our Inner City Feng Shui

Another day another school shooting, this time in California. Californians might suggest we burn sage. But smudging will not realign the feng shui of our burned out inner cities. Real investment in our people is what is required. Occupiers were drawn to the cities to find their voice. Rather than help them coalesce into a greater understanding that what they sought was a hopeful future and what was required could be obtained through reason, we tormented them with pepper spray showers. 

OWS was our Iran moment, our Arab spring. But this bubbling democracy of our voiceless youth was too messy. They said childish things that sounded too naively socialistic and purposeless. The danger was that they could be manipulated by a radically left wing conspiracy to seek out the assets of the elite, and this mob was too anarchist even for the Democratic mayors to tolerate so they were quashed. 

Yet they were at least able to express an instinct that this economic tsunami that washed so many good people out of their jobs was not equitable. They also instinctively knew that their dreams of owning their own homes and businesses had vanished for many for a generation. And they too could see the billions of criminal financial deals continuing to position investment houses to destroy people’s retirements while their government crawled impotently into a fetal position. Whether in gutted inner cities or in the childhood bedrooms of their parent’s homes from which they were now imprisoned, theirs would be a lost generation. 

And now, in the aftermath of what was to be a peaceful, nationwide demonstration intended to be a voice of reasoning, to allow an outlet of understanding in the wake of our economic disaster, now we see violent sparks of mass gun aggression like dangling wires on a cracked electric pole in the wake of a socially disturbed earthquake. We wonder if this is just the beginning of the damage we will uncover as the lost generation crawls out of the sewers. 

So here we are thirty five years after running into China, wondering what has happened but we can never get back what we lost and 2008 has taken what it has. We are where we are, gutted inner cities, a lost millennial generation, and all. We can hear the faint remnants of the occupiers as a call to reason but we instead choose to defiantly knee jerk into our further inner sanctum of a police state, righteously defending our turf from whatever ill will we perceive this karma to be. Perhaps, instead we can choose to reassess our point in life and choose to progress from here, to create a future for this generation, to give them hope.

S. 1867 is to Occupy Wall Street as Monica Lewinsky was to President Clinton’s Impeachment

In Clinton’s impeachment that culminated from four years of Ken Starr’s investigation, we saw the overreach of our government involving federal investigators, the U.S. Congress, and an impeachment committee that pursued Bill Clinton’s definition of the word “is”. After years of attempts to hang the President on such matters as Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster, his impeachment rested on the President’s perjury about two fellatio protagonists and his attempt to not tell the American people about his sexual proclivities.

This massive use of state power to expose the President’s sex acts was seen by the American people as abusive in the end. Yet, I for one, had been lulled by the moral majority in the years leading up to President Clinton’s impeachment into a false reality that America had not slipped morally to the point where it was common place for young ladies to perform such acts as came to be known through Clinton’s trial as “non-sex”. I mistakenly believed that America was experiencing a thousand points of light even though an epidemic of “non-sex” Herpes cases were occurring amongst our young people at the same time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

It took the extraordinary spectacle of his impeachment to expose the social atmosphere of our nation. Not only were the nature of our President’s physical characteristics and sexual exploits embarrassingly exposed but so was the trend of our nation’s sexual culture. And shockingly, Larry Flint, Hustler Publisher, exposed the hypocrisy of sexual improprieties of Republicans that participated in his impeachment. Larry claimed to have exposing evidence of a dozen such cases. For instance, Bob Barr, who had run his congressional campaign on family values, was exposed for his cheating and abortion. Flint also uncovered Gingrich’s affair with Callista Bisek.

This whimsical, topsy turvy, and simultaneously extravagant spectacle of government excess turned over a slimy stone exposing the slithering underbelly of hypocrisy in Washington and the mirrored behavior of our populace they represented. We had projected through our government representation our expectations in Washington and then felt the sting of judgmentalism as their spectacle shined a light on our trending culture.

Now we once again have been exposed in New York, Oakland and elsewhere as the roots of excessive governmental overreach have broken the surface of our collective consciousness. We watched in horror as our police power struck down peaceful, sitting, interlocking arms of protest with overreaching sprays of pepper into their yet idealized faces. This act perhaps marked the beginnings of a shift in understanding of our culture’s police trend and of its mirrored excesses in Washington.

Our response to 9/11 was to let the pendulum of justice swing wildly toward the restriction of liberty in the name of security. Left unchecked, our police powers have grown like weeds underneath the tarp of Homeland Security into an intertwining local, State and Federal complex supported by our Congress that is entangling our society in a future of perpetual terroristic defensive war. Occupy Wall Street is the fluky exposure of this societal trend just as Linda Tripp’s secret audio tapes of Monica Lewinsky crying about being moved by Clintonites away from the White House to protect the President became the fluky exposure of our nation’s sexual social trends in the 1990s.

Occupy Wall Street just happened to shock America into the notion that our nation has become much more of a police state than we ever imagined. S. 1867, the bill that allows American citizens that are suspected as terrorists to be locked up indefinitely without trial is just another data point in the now emerging reality of our acceptance of such servitude.