Drink at the Bar Nothing bar anythingThe song's lyrics make it clear that the things Occupy has been protesting, and the things that a whole lot of us have been pointing out in the last few years, aren't recent phenomena. The gap between the rich and the poor started getting wider back in the 1970s, and it was folks, as the composer put it, at the bottom of the ladder who were the first to notice.
But the bottom step of the ladder
It keeps gettin' higher and higher
Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.
It keeps getting sooner or later.
This is the game that moves as you play.
X: The Have Nots
This is one of the more well-known songs of a Los Angeles punk rock group called X. According to their website, they'll be doing a tour of the Southwest soon.
2 comments:
It takes a long time to build a popular movement like Occupy. They only appear to spring up overnight -- but the discontent that causes them has usually been simmering for sometime.
And, once a popular movement does appear, it can sometimes take decades for the movement to reach its fullest effect.
People who think the Occupy Movement is a flash in the pan are likely to be disappointed.
I think you're right, if only because I think that as long as the motivations continue to exist, something like Occupy will be around. Given its somewhat evolutionary nature, I'm guessing it will be rather different in a few years, but it will still be around.
Having been trained in physics and being somewhat aware of biology, I think of social movements in these terms. When something like Occupy happens, there's a reason. We may not understand human minds enough to describe them precisely as forces or genes, but we react to the things happening around us, and the basic direction of those reactions are predictable.
The really important thing to me is why these things are happening, and what the constraints are in our potential responses to them. What looking at those factors says to me is that people who think this is a fad or a momentary thing have no idea what's going on.
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