What Is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
I received an urgent transmission from my children’s school the other day. President Obama was scheduled to address the impressionable young minds of our kids at 12:30 pm on September 28 and my children’s middle school wanted to offer parents “the opportunity to opt their children out of viewing the Presidential speech.”
The school was going to make the Presidential speech available to students, but allow the partisan and/or bigoted parental crowd to shield their probably already-sheltered offspring from anything threatening the pale (as in white, conservative and “good”) worldview that they themselves espouse and do everything in their power to instill in their children.
The image of former President George W. Bush (looking dazed and meek) sitting in a classroom full of kids while the terrorists attacked on 9/11, came to mind. Had that school contacted all their pupils’ parents to make sure it
Beyond Bologna
At the Wall Street protest, a young woman carried a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN,” and I don’t doubt that she was having a great time, because it can be exhilarating to engage in a just and noble fight, and to feel that you are an agent of change, a participant in history even, and not just one of its faceless victims, as is the common lot. So fun, yes, at least for her, and at least up to that moment, until the violence explodes, as nearly always happens in anything approaching a political revolution.
The violence of September 24th, the 8th day of the anti-Wall Street Protest, appears to not have caused severe or permanent injuries, though it was brutal enough, and some outrage has even flared in the mainstream media. Anthony Bologna, a 28-year-veteran of the New York Police Department, has emerged as a clear cut villain. Without provocation, he pepper sprayed two young women in the faces, and for this he should certainly be fired, then locked up, but this commotion has overshadowed, at least momentarily, the real target and meaning of this protest. Though police brutality is never to be taken lightly, Occupy Wall Street is aiming to expose and hold to
