Chris Floyd on Occupy Wall Street

I started out as a skeptic. I wanted Occupy Wall Street to come up with an agenda, and to dump the democrats once and for all. I have been writing, speaking and thinking about issues for a long time now, and I realize that I am ahead of other people who are new at social action.

I have had second thoughts after attending the Times Square rally last week. I saw and felt the energy, and yes the joy created by people who are taking the first steps to doing something different. Chris Floyd, one of my favorite bloggers, puts it this way.

"It seems to me that the whole point of the Occupy movement, in its multiplicity of forms, is to MAKE A START. To not simply bow the head and bend the knee, and give up and say, Oh Lordy, the Man is too powerful for me, He controls everything, there's nothing anyone can do. The point, it seems to me, is just to show up and stand up and say out loud, as Thoreau said, "We disassociate ourselves from this rigged, corrupt, immoral system."

Isn't this what dissidents have been urging people to do for years now? I know this site has been full of commenters -- and my own blog posts -- calling for something exactly like this. Saying: Do it individually, if you have to, do it en masse -- but DO SOMETHING! Stand up, speak out and disassociate yourself from all this evil. Start looking for other ways: try this, try that, try the other, and if all that fails, try something else -- but DO SOMETHING."

I am still concerned about the lack of specificity and I'm not comfortable with the slow and amorphous nature of the consensus method of having discussions. Still I am glad that this movement has begun. I have to remember that I started out just wanting to end a war. I never thought I would be proudly saying that I have no intention of voting for another democratic president. I had to start somewhere.