The Light That Cracks The Darkness

Twenty five thousand marched in Granada. In Seville they numbered fifty thousand. In Zaragoza seventy thousand took to the streets, while eighty thousand gathered in Valencia.

In Barcelona, four hundred and fifty thousand Indignats flooded the streets of Catalunya’s capital city. In Madrid five hundred thousand Indignados swarmed through the city, before converging once again on their beloved Puerta Del Sol. By day’s end, more than a million people, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, marched in cities across the country, coming together to tear at the darkness that looms over them.  

This is what democracy looks like.

On Sunday the outraged returned to the streets of Spain. They returned to remind us all what the defiant energy of the downtrodden feels like; what the unwavering voice of dissent sounds like. This army of street kids and grandmothers, of workers and students, of anarchists and activists, returned to make it known that they are still here, they have not forgotten, and they are definitely not finished. 

If it was ever a question of whether or not they had given up, it’s been answered. If notions lingered in the minds of the politicians these past few weeks that the people -- turned backwards and forwards by Spain’s short but strange winter, a schizophrenic mix of unseasonable warmth and chill -- might have fallen into lethargy or a tired acceptance of the hard times plotted out for them, those notions were erased on Sunday. 

Newly elected Prime Minister Rajoy and his Partido Popular might have thought they had escaped without wounds on 20^th November, the default victors of a pantomime vote that offered the people a twisted play on democratic choice. In reality they were asked if they preferred to drown or to suffocate. This sham election was rejected by 10 million voters. They chose neither. They rejected the illusion.  These new public officials might have mistaken the unwillingness of so many to legitimise their own suffering as a mandate to replenish the coffers of high finance; to force the people to bow down, as they do, in worship of the markets.

If such a mistake was made, this return of outrage on the streets corrected it. 

What the Indignados did afford their fledgling government, was time. A few months to plot out a new course, to offer up a hopeful alternative, to lay new cards on the table and present ideas not designed to break the backs of the under classes. What their new leaders came to them with was an admission that they have nothing new to offer, and never intended to. In their eyes it’s business as usual; more of the same. "Reforma Laboral" that takes rights and wages away from the people; that affords corporations convenient new tools to rid themselves of older, poorly paid employees in order to replace them with desperate new blood that will work for even less; a fire-to-hire scheme as an answer to mass national unemployment, that amounts to little more than rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. 

On Sunday, the people kindly rejected their proposal. 

The Spanish refuse to sit by and watch as the same measures that have left mothers giving up children they can’t feed in Greece, that have more and more signing on for the dole in the United Kingdom, and that have already put more than half of their own youth out of work,  are forced upon them while executive pay is capped at 600,000 euros annually. They will not be locked into financial slavery and routinely humiliated. They have seen what these failed ideas have done to Greece. They will not have the same done to them. Not without a push back. 

The sun is shining in Spain again, and the air gets warmer from one day to the next. The ruling classes don’t have to change this course of protecting profits at all costs; of recouping their losses by scavenging from those with the least, but if they don't they should expect resistance. Summer is coming, and with nearly a quarter of the population out of work and angry, there’s ample opportunity for mass action. There is no hiding from it. Expect the acampadas to return -- sooner rather than later.

The return of 15M and Los Indignados should be well observed by the Occupy movement also. The manifestations that grew from a few hundred in Puerta Del Sol to hundreds of thousands taking the streets and squares across Spain in 2011 laid out the blueprint and inspiration for the occupations that exploded across the western world. Now, as Occupy struggles with irrelevancy in cities like New York, Toronto and London, it is time to rediscover your focus, to draw inspiration from the outraged here in Spain, as you did before. March side by side with union members rather than be co-opted by their leadership. Resist the plans of special interests, and of the democratic wing on the bird to manipulate you into a mass lobby group; a tea party to call their own. Reject the subtle manipulations of billionaires looking to turn you into a violent mob, and ultimately, the engine powering an agenda that will only lead to deeper control for the elites and their puppets in office. To find your voice and your resolve again, look to Spain. Mira a España .

This is what revolution looks like. 

False Evidence Appearing Real

On the night of September 11^th, 2001, after an exhausting day watching the birth of the 21^st century live in my dank, cigarette-smoke filled living room, I was sat in my favourite local pub with a few friends. We were all getting drunk. At the table next to us, and the table next to them, sat people all in the same boat. They were also getting drunk. Every table and every stool at the bar contained a snapshot – an identical image repeated over and over again: bewildered, sometimes angry faces pouring a bit of liquid comfort down their throats, each talking about the same awful bloody tragedy, trying and failing to make some sense of it. From person to person the arguments varied wildly, the emotional responses swerved from hysteria to hatred. We didn’t agree on much, but we didn’t really have to right then and there. We needed to talk, to get drunk, and be together because we didn’t want to be alone

We didn’t want to be alone because we were terrified.

People in homes and bars and cafes all over the world were drowning in this same sense of fear and dread. Whether you were feeling it in Boston or Baghdad, or if you were watching Fox News or Al Jazeera, you felt it. You might have feared that your city was the next target. You might have feared that you would be crushed by the full might of the inevitable response. Whatever the individual cause for panic, it was cripplingly real and near impossible to overcome. We had all just watched several thousand people die in a heap of concrete, twisted metal, and a choking cloud of ash and dust. We witnessed people trapped on the top floors of two mammoth skyscrapers leap to their deaths; many of us watched it repeated over and over again in a grotesque loop broadcast across all channels. As much as we wanted to, we couldn’t look away. These horrible visions were burning into our retinas to a soundtrack of screaming New Yorkers running through the streets and news anchors repeatedly uttering names like Bid Laden, Hussein, and Al Qaeda. It was an unrelenting assault on the senses, with any hope of escape completely futile. Logic and reason were high tailing it out the door. The fear had taken hold, and it wasn’t about to let go anytime soon.

What followed after that day was a calculated pageant of fear and loathing, designed to convince the people of the west to keep quiet while the military industrial complex set about inventing wars as a means to epic profit and a tightening of their grip on individual rights. This is an old trick, though – one that fools us every time. 

The fear of communism directed the actions of the west for nearly fifty years. The scaremongering rhetoric that arose about the horrors of a red state was so masterfully orchestrated that to this day there is a certain sort of person still checking under his bed at night to make sure a “commie” isn’t lying in wait to steal his freedom and force him to wait in line for a roll of toilet paper. War is great business, and for decades the mere possibility of an impending fight for ideological survival led to fortunes being made through the manufacturing and sale of ever more terrifying weapons. The theory proves true over and over again. We are easily scared into submission.

For thousands of years fear has been used by Pharaohs and Presidents, Imams and Popes, CEOs and marketing gurus alike, as a means to control, to persuade, to make you do as you’re told. Many never stand a chance against its ability to cajole us so perfectly because from a very early age we are taught that failure to obey a higher authority will have damning consequences.

Before we have a say in the matter, most of us are taught that if you do not do as your god wants you face a never ending torrent of punishment and torture. Fearsome old men in grand costumes preach to us that these are the commands of our supreme father, a vague and faceless figure we cannot see or communicate with but through his human emissary. They assure us that he is everywhere and he wants you to follow his rules. The penance that awaits you for not living your life by the wishes of whichever creator you believe in are nightmarish and eternal -- and bloody frightening. The lesson starts early: Do as we say, or horrible consequences await you.

We move into adulthood carrying this deeply entrenched control switch with us, and the fears pile on, one on top of the other. Insecurities about your social standing become a constant presence as you are guided by a new minister: the marketer. Soon you come to believe that your status defines you, and your status is calculated by the things you own. You need a house bigger than the next guy's, a new car more expensive than the next guy's. Designer brand name clothing that immediately tells everyone how well you’re doing. The newest iPhone the nanosecond it becomes available. The biggest HD, 3D, LCD, flatscreen, plasma television monstrosity you can find, regardless of whether you can afford it. These things define you. They tell everyone else how much you have, and how important you are. Whether you need them or not is irrelevant. Enslave yourself in a sea of debt because if you don’t have these things, you have failed the game of life.

It is a dark and devilish business. Fear makes us consume.

There is profit to be made in keeping the public fearful. Few industries understand this idea – or have realized it so perfectly – as the war industry. This was the industry that kicked the use of fear as control into overdrive after 9/11. Hours of television reports told us that terrorists were everywhere, lurking in the shadows of every city and every town in the free world. Leaders took to podiums in Washington and London and scared the living daylights out of us. Strange and foreign invaders armed with dirty bombs, box cutters, anthrax and hatred were plotting against us. Thousands of terrorist cells were operating in hundreds of cities across the world, all with one common goal: To kill you and everyone you love.

Who wouldn’t be afraid of that?

This was the politics of fear firing on all cylinders, convincing us to make war in the Middle East against enemies old and new. The war against terror in Afghanistan led to the war on hazy nuclear threats in Iraq. Once again they sold the people fear, with murky photos of weapons facilities and suspect rumours about Nigerian uranium, and the people devoured it. In the end, completely disoriented by the constant doom surrounding us, we barely noticed as our rights were thoroughly trimmed down in the name of security. Peace through war. Love through hate. It was more than big brother could have asked for.

Today, in a year of revolution and ongoing civil disobedience, those who want to keep us afraid are telling us there is a new terror lying in wait: the dissenter. The radical is what you need to fear next. The occupier and the indignado are asking questions the elite don’t have answers for, and now they are back to the tried and true method of marginalization through fear. In London, the authorities have named the occupy movement a terrorist organization. Apparently filthy hippies sitting in public squares with no clear message are as dangerous to your way of life as Al Qaeda. In the mainstream media, the persistent message of the occupy movement is that of shiftless bums and violent drug addicts demanding handouts from the rich and successful. The camps are rife with the worst elements of society, people living on the dark fringes. Even the old red menace has reared its paranoid head.

The truth is occupy camps contain these elements of society, as does each community the world over. Drug addicts overdosing at occupy camps would have overdosed alone in some other dark part of the city. In many cases, being at the camps saved them from death. Those who live on the edge of the knife aren’t drug addicts, or mentally ill because they are at camps offering them hot food and some semblance of shelter for the night, they are at the camps providing these things because they are drug addicts, or suffering mental illness –- or both. Mainstream society left them behind a long time ago.

When we think it over for a moment, when logic and reason don’t high tail it out the door, when we don’t choose to fall for it, the fear mongering can be seen for what it is: dishonest manipulation.

The question is will we fall for it again, or not?

The Words of the Prophets are Written on the Subway Walls

There was a time, not so long ago, when the world of journalism created epic figures and instilled them in the public consciousness: Hemingway and Gellhorn documenting the fight against fascism in Spain; Edward R. Murrow taking to the airwaves to speak out against McCarthyism and the communist witch hunt as it spread across the United States during the 1950s; Woodward and Bernstein blowing the roof off “Watergate”, taking down a president in the process; Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo tours of American culture and the campaign trail seen through a haze of uppers, downers, screamers and laughers. Rather than just reporting the events of the day, these larger than life icons of the medium helped us to understand them, and when necessary, to question the truth behind the headline. 


These men and women weren't simply the chroniclers of their times, they were avatars for those at home. This was journalism as protest, journalism as a weapon against tyranny, journalism as a light to shine on corruption, and in Thompson’s case, journalism as psychedelic experience. Above all, it was journalism as a means of conversation.


Sadly things are very different now. Those voices are ghosts of the past, replaced with shrill, dishonest mouthpieces. Mainstream media in the west has abandoned the conversation in favor of the slogan. While it is true that corporations have long owned the news media, there was a time when they did not so deeply and blatantly control how the story gets told. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Occupy movement’s fight against the same corporate overmind that controls the old media, these propagandists are not “on side” with the cause. You might as well expect a dog to bite the hand that feeds it.


In the aftermath of 9/11, Edward R. Murrow’s warning that we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty came to a morbid fruition. To ask questions about why the attacks happened, or to question who or what was the ultimate root cause became an act of betrayal. To even suggest that decades of imperialist policies, passed from Britain and France to The United States, may have had some part to play in the horror was likely to get you a swift kick in the balls, or worse. As the west marched to war, moving from the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to the hunt for WMDs in Iraq, we had no Murrow questioning the motivations and the methods of the Bush Presidency. What few voices there were in the media asking the questions were ridiculed, admonished, or snuffed out entirely, shouted down by the parrots and the patriots.


Like many a big lie, the truth eventually came to light. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or anything more than a paper thin justification for invasion. The war on terror, like Oceania’s “perpetual war” in George Orwell’s 1984 was never intended to be won, merely to be fought. The truth came too late. The dissenters, their questions silenced with talk of treason and support for dictators, were unable to halt the slogan from killing the conversation. Ironically enough, this stifling of dissent pushed those who wanted to have the conversation, who dared to ask the questions, toward the same tool that now drives perhaps the largest conversation to ever take place.


The internet is where the great barking dog of corporate owned, ideologically aligned media banished those who wanted to have a true dialogue, to ask the important questions. Once they all got there, it was only a matter of time before they started talking to each other, and realized many felt the same way: that something was very wrong with just about everything. These conversations spread from the message boards, the twitter feeds, the facebook walls and the blogosphere to the streets of Tunisia and Egypt, to the squares of Spain and Greece, to the student unions of Chile. When the old media locked the people out of the discourse, choosing to present the news as something to be processed, packaged and consumed for profit rather than absorbed for knowledge, they helped to create a new media with new journalists and a renewed sense that the questions must be asked. Always. Now, this new media is quickly making them irrelevant.


The contradictory, near schizophrenic way these dinosaur news outlets have reacted to what has quickly turned into a year of revolution, uprising, and occupation belies just how deep their ties to the corporate brand go. Revolts against regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya have been lauded and praised, stuffed to bursting with the buzzwords of capitalism. American media trumpeted “Freedom” and “Democracy” and “Western Values” when uprisings target clear enemies abroad, be they actual figureheads or simply unsavory ideas.


However when the people began rising up in America, taking to the streets in New York, Chicago, Oakland and countless other cities to rage against the methodical, amoral hijacking of their democratic process, the rhetoric changed. The cheers turned to jeers. The bluster and the bravado shown for brave revolutionaries abroad changed to bile and venom spewed for lazy, unemployed drug users, hippies, and communists here at home.


The North American movements, in particular, are most often faced with a corporate media whose sole interest is to marginalize them to the point where no one will take them seriously. The questions have been asked without their approval. This mass awakening of the underclasses had gone viral while Beck and O’Reilly were trying to work out what exactly that smiley-faced mask was all about. The old media works so hard to mock and discredit the occupiers because they question the golden calf the old media worships under, and what’s worse, this new media the activists have created has revealed that many arms of the old guard have sold their profession down the river. They took what was once a calling and turned it into a racket, and now they are being forced to look at themselves in the mirror.


Occupiers across the globe must come to the realization that it is pointless to hope and beg for sympathy and a fair shake from these bought and sold news outlets or the corporate mascots they put on the air day in and day out. They will always try to belittle, discredit, and spit on you from a great height. They will do whatever is necessary to warp the perception of their audience. They will take the words or the actions of one mad man in your open societies and prescribe them to all of you, because that is what they are paid to do. You are calling to rights their corporate feeding trough. Having tossed their ethics and integrity aside over the last ten or so years, all they can do is fight, brutal and dirty, to keep the corporate mother’s milk flowing. They hate you for having integrity. They hate you for having ethics. They hate you for daring to question the system that they allowed to devour them. They hate you for resurrecting the conversation in the face of their sloganeering.


The truth is you don’t need them.


Not their approval, or their respect, or their airtime. The old media scoffed at your ideas and ignored you, and as a result you created a new one, and its circulation is unparalleled. The new writers, and the seasoned journalists pushed to the fringes for refusing to give up their voice, now speak to millions with each click of a mouse. The social networks, the blogs, the twitter feeds and the YouTube videos are your medium. These are the tools that brought a million people on to the streets all across the world on October 15th, and each day thousands of new users find your articles and editorials. Some will agree with you, and some will not, but all will be allowed to join the discussion.


Simon & Garfunkel’s classic The Sound of Silence tells us “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls”. The walls have been digitized, and the virtual halls are filled with millions of tenants, eager for knowledge, for perspective and most importantly, for the conversation to continue.

"Te quiero, Barcelona..."

On the ground at 15-O Barcelona

Photos by Wendy Taylor

When my wife and I first decided to cross the Atlantic and start living a new sort of life, Barcelona was the only real choice. In our small apartment on Toronto's Queen Street West we would dream of sitting at street side cafes, sipping con leches and Americanos, smoking cigarettes, listening to Spanish guitar, and most importantly, working to live as opposed to living to work. Six months on, we have that new life we'd hoped for. What was unexpected, was to land in our new home just as a revolution was being born here in Spain, one that has now spread to the new world we left, and effortlessly destroyed the cynicism that had grown in me over the first 12 or so years of my adult life.

Just a month into our new lives here, it all boiled over. Citizens across Spain began taking to the streets, occupying the vast squares and public spaces in their city centres. They came to give manifestation to their outrage over what was being forced upon them by the controllers of global finance, by the money men who own the politicians that are elected to represent the people, but have long since lost interest in doing so. In Barcelona I watched as the Catalan Els Indignats joined with the Castellan Los Indignados across Spain, setting up camp in Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya, the grand square in the Catalonian capital city that connects the old barrios of Raval and Gotic with the 19^th century modern expansion known as Eixample. Here, amongst the constant flow of tourists and the bold as brass pigeons, they joined their countrymen in Madrid’s Puerta Del Sol, and countless other Indignados in cities all over Spain, to be the bright star, the big bang of what we are now calling the “Occupy” movement. 




Before AdBusters and Anonymous successfully forced the eyes of the world to turn to Wall Street, the world’s symbolic heart of elite finance and the capitalist dream, the Indignant ones here in Spain were drawing up the blueprint for them. Here in these little DIY barrios they crafted the unique ideas behind this growing shift in perspective. In Plaça Catalunya they built ramshackle kitchens, dormitories, a library, and a media centre to keep the world aware of what was happening. International media giants weren’t interested, but the people were. They followed the movement on Facebook, on Twitter, on Youtube. They voiced their support for Spain’s outraged, and only a few months later, took the cause to a stage that could not be ignored.

   

On October 15th hundreds of thousands of people, in a thousand cities across the world came out into their streets to occupy their cities, to support those in New York who took over Zucotti Park in mid September, and to take the next step in a global push for change that is not going away, despite the best efforts of our corporate media giants to ignore and mock them. Here in Barcelona, we went back to where it all began: Plaça Catalunya. 

Just before 5pm we arrived at the edge of the square, crossing the famous Passeig de Gracia, and wandering into the gathering crowd. Already a few thousand had arrived, so we decided to stroll through and take a look at the different faces coming together.

Mixed in among the “Perro Flautas”, youth who live with their dogs on the street and play music for a few euros here and there, that the authorities often blame for these uprisings, were old Senors and Senoras who had lived through the dark days of Franco. There were young families crippled by the crisis with their children in tow, and of course, many a Guy Fawkes mask grinning out at us. This is not some collection of disaffected youth that can be easily brushed aside as a rabble of lazy unemployed misfits, more intent on drinking Estrella’s and asking for handouts than doing an honest day's work. Standing alongside the young and the outraged are their grandmothers and grandfathers, their older brothers and sisters, new mothers and fathers struggling to feed their children. A friend who had joined us shortly after we arrived pointed out a sign, held up by an older woman which read “No tengo un perro, no tengo una flauta!” I have no dog, I have no flute! 

Right on time at 5pm, several massive columns of people converged on the square from three or four different directions. Within moments, what was a group of a few thousand swelled out of the square and onto the roads surrounding the Plaça . People began to move through the central square to join with the larger groups on the streets. Men and women carried long banners overhead, young girls with pierced lips and shaved heads walked side by side with white haired grandfathers. Tattooed, mohawked, and sometimes mulleted tough looking punks walked side by side with old matrons in their weekend best and mothers with little kids in their arms and on their shoulders. These were people of different generations, and of different walks of life, coming together in a fight to take their democracy back.

We watched as the crowd swelled all around us and soon, looking out in any direction, we saw only the indignant. The collection of faces, with cheers and raised hands, moved out onto Passeig de Gracia to begin their march, and then the music started. 

Dotted throughout the crowd were small groups of musicians wielding an assortment of drums and various other percussion instruments. As they began to play, people cheered, and took to dancing all around them. My wife and one of our friends joined in the dancing from our spot on the raised grass hill in front of one of the square’s two large fountains. This crowd was the very picture of peace and joy, with no interest in destruction or violence. They didn't need that. They were here together, and they were happy.

We all moved up along Passeig de Gracia, a great collection of faces and voices moving through our city. Songs of unity from the old days of dictatorship rang out in time with new slogans of indignation. It became clear once we had taken to walking that the drummers and dancers were there not only to entertain the crowd, they were there to keep things open and calm. The drum bands would stop and perform brilliant and elaborate pieces of music for the crowd around them, allowing the marchers to flow easily along the street. Two or three women would come out of the throng of protestors and dance frantically to the beat of the drums; One curious little blonde haired boy with an edgy looking mullet joined in as well, quickly becoming the star of the little show. Behind him his young mother, with an edgy looking mullet of her own, flashed a beautiful smile as she watched her son upstage the musicians for a moment.

As the last light of the evening sun faded behind Sagrat Cor church in the mountains, we passed under the watchful eye of Gaudi, Catalunya’s visionary architect, as we walked by his scaly roofed “Casa Battlo” and turned right onto Carrer d’Aragó. Here, on this one way street, the indignant descended upon the institutions that had failed them. There was no violence, but the banks and corporate strongholds that can be found on every corner of Aragó were plastered with anti-corporate posters, and the walls covered with clever slogans in Catalan and Castellano alike. It was here that I read a short slogan that gave perfect voice to the perspective shared by those across this country:

 "If you have a gun you can rob a bank, but if you have a bank, you can rob everyone..."

The message is concise, and it is clear. We are the victims of a grand theft, but these bankers, investors, speculators and corporate elites have stolen much more than just our money, they have stolen our democracy. They have hijacked our representation to make disgusting levels of profit. They have crafted a sick joke to play on all of us, and for far too long, we let them. They got so good at telling the joke that they believed it impossible for us to ever get the punch line. They do not want to believe that we can ever be anything other than blind.


Now, our eyes are opening. We are beginning to understand the joke that’s been played on us, by those that we are told to admire, revere, and fear. The rich, the powerful, the politicians with lined pockets. We are all starting to learn though, that they should be afraid of us, not us of them. 


As the happy revolutionaries turned off Aragó and on to Passeig de Sant Joan to make their way to the Arc de Triomphe, my friends and I left the march to have a drink and to talk. Underneath a clear, star filled black sky we sat and discussed what we had been a part of, and what this movement was turning into. As we did, one thing became clear to me: While New York and Occupy Wall Street has become the important face of this movement, Spain and Los Indignados remain it’s strong heart, pumping fresh blood through the veins of this new revolution, growing all across the world. 




To see more of Wendy's work, visit: http://wendytaylorphotography.blogspot.com/

You say you want a Revolution?

The great unwashed have reached their limit. In different nations, different cities, and for different reasons, people are coming to the same conclusion, at roughly the same time: This system is broken.

 In Greece citizens have marched, been assaulted, and died in an effort to stop crippling austerity measures being forced upon them by their leaders, the same people who allowed the banking system that holds their leashes to hurl the nation into a black void of debt. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people have risen up in search of a voice, full stop. They demanded freedom of speech, an end to police and military brutality, and the right to vote. In both cases, they fought and they won. In Spain, from the sprawling city streets of Barcelona and Madrid, to the quaint and picturesque towns of Figueres and Soria, the 15 de Mao movement, with its Castellan “Los Indignados” and Catalan “Els Indignats”, fought a happy revolution, occupying the grand squares of their ancient cities in a non violent, extended sit in. They erected make shift barrios, complete with libraries, canteens, daycare facilities, and media centres that allowed them to keep the message online and global twenty four hours a day. In Barcelona I saw first hand how pacifist and joyous these revolutionaries were. When the police came to move them, they did not raise a hand. When they were forced from the square, they returned immediately. They weren’t there to fight, but they refused to be chased away. Before long, it moved across the pond, where protestors in Santiago, Chile turned student protests over the state of education in the country into a full scale revolt against the country’s political system.

Now, it’s come to America.

  By now you know the details. It started small, with the vast majority of the American mainstream media doing it’s best to ignore the gathering in Liberty Plaza Park. Then, hemmed in protestors were needlessly pepper sprayed by the NYPD. Before long, no media outlet could ignore what was happening, not even FOX News.

  Now 23 days in, the movement grows in New York daily, and like Spain before, it’s spreading. As of October 7^th, similar movements have cropped up from Washington DC to San Francisco. They are taking to the streets in the windy city of Chicago and in the mile high city of Denver. From the swamps of New Jersey to the desert in Albuquerque, Americans are rising up and joining the rest of the world to tell the governments, and more importantly, the corporations, the banks, and the disgustingly rich who run the show behind the curtain: Enough.

  Three years ago we all watched as corporate greed broke the back of our neo liberal system. We watched as the world’s largest banks, all complicit in driving us into the greatest economic collapse since the great depression, had hundreds of billions turned over to them because they were “too big to fail”. For our efforts, we watched them use the cash to pay out millions in bonuses to the same high level bankers and investors that brought the economy to its knees. All that mattered to them, all which ever mattered to them, was getting rich, no matter the cost to the rest of us. If it was ever really in doubt that the rich, the powerful, and the fortunate have crafted a world where they thrive off the toil and struggle of those underneath them, there can be no such illusion left. The only thing they didn’t count on, unsurprisingly, is that this time they have pushed us to our limit. At least we should all hope they have.

  If this revolution is to succeed, there can be no let up from the will of the people. One day, one week, one month is not going to be enough. 100,000 protestors, while impressive, will not get them to listen. This truly has to be a revolt of the 99%, on a global scale. Every one who has been foreclosed upon, or had their young lives crippled right from the start by insurmountable debt, must take to the streets. We cannot just be Tunisians and Egyptians or Greeks. We cannot just be Castellan and Catalan. We cannot just be Chileans and New Yorkers. This is not a case of “your” revolution or “mine”. It belongs to all of us, and must be embraced by all of us. If you cannot take to the streets to be heard, take your voice online. If you cannot march against consumerism and the greed that it fosters, stop buying useless shit you don’t need. If you want a true change of the system, it starts with breaking free from the system.

  On October 15^th, people across the world will come out from their homes and into their streets to raise their voices in support of the occupation of Wall Street, in support of the student protestors in Chile, in a reflection of the happy revolutionaries of Spain, and above all else in support of each other. Whether you are there for an hour, a day, or a year, make your self heard. You are not just one.

You are the 99 percent.