2012 Lenten GuideWeek 2

Occupy: A Movment Past and PresentThe Occupy movement can be a bit difficult to understand and po-litical allegiances often influence one’s view quite heavily. Weeding through the media’s portrayal of Occupy Wall Street and various local Occupy camps can be cumbersome enough for adults, but when I think about explaining Occupy to my 3 year old daughter, I am just at a loss. However, I recently happened upon a local expression of the occupy movement that gave me hope for explaining the movement to my daughter. I think you will understand why when you see the pictures below!

Why Occupy?There is no common “platform” of the occupy movement. It is con-textual to the particular struggles in each city and place. A common theme is the mantra “We are the 99%”. This mantra expresses the pow-erlessness of the many beneath the few, particularly in an economic fashion, ie. 1% of the people of the US hold 37% of the wealth while the rest is distributed among the remaining 99%. In fact the next 19% hold another 50%. That means that the bottom 80% of us have less than 10% of our countries wealth. And the bottom 80% includes those of us who make less than $88,000 a year in total income.

This means that out of 100 people with a total of $100,000

• 1 person has $37,000• 19 people have a total of $48,000 which means about $2500 each• The next 20 people have a total of $10,000 which means $500 each• The middle 20 have a total of $4000 which means $200 each• The next 20 have $200 which means $10 each• The bottom 20 have $100 which means $5 each

Now these numbers can be striking, but for those in the bottom of these quintiles it is not just striking - it is a daily struggle to survive. And it has made folks angry. In fact, some suggest that the only com-mon thread among the occupy movement is anger.

Anger is certainly a common theme among people who are tired of oppression, of being pushed to the bottom of the economic ladder. Yet there is something deeper than anger. The Occupy movement, while it is new in this generation, is not without roots. In fact, in many ways the occupy movement is a contemporary expression of a movement started by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

After victories during the civil rights movement of the early and mid 1960’s, King began to realize that far more was at stake than just civil liberties and human rights. During his travels, King began to see the economic injustices of the United States and he was moved and disturbed by them. Though the SCLC, King planned and launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967 which was highlighted by a march from Mississippi to Washing, DC to set up a shantytown called Resur-rection City on the mall at the same site King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King was shot and killed before the march and creation of Resurrection City, yet the SCLC went through with King’s plans.1

Today’s occupy movement certainly comes in line with the ideas behind the Poor People’s Campaign (see article), though there are differences. In many ways the Occupy villages are not all that different than Resurrection City. In fact, one could view Resurrection City as an Occupy Washington, DC group.

Yet what is most striking to me is the similar purpose I see within both the Poor People’s Campaign of the 1960’s and the Occupy Movement of 2011. This purpose is best described by Alexis Madrigal in an article in The Atlantic:

The point is not to hold a city park. The point is to dramatize the struggle of weak against strong, which is also the struggle of poor against rich. If the dominant theme of the occupations

Above: Resurrection City, 1968 Below: Occupy Wall Street, Oakland, 2011

1 See The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV on the following page as well as:• Eyes on the Prize—PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sto-

ry/15_poor.html• History of the Poor People’s Campaign http://www.poorpeoplescampaignppc.org/

HISTORY.html• Photo Gallery of the Poor People’s Campaign http://johnphillipsphotography.com/

Poor_People_Gallery/index.html

is, as Jay Rosen succinctly put it, “public policy favors the rich,” then having the public police arrest the weak becomes a pow-erful metaphor for the message of the movement.

I believe the greatest point that the Occupy Movement has to make is a dramatizion of the daily struggle of the powerless (the “have-nots” or the “have-less-and-less”) against those in power (the “haves”). This was the primary point of the the Poor People’s Campaign. Today, the Occupiers have as much, if not more, opportunity to turn power in on itself in a similar way to the civil rights movement of days past. Let us pray that we all have the eyes, ears and hearts to comprehend and understand the unfolding Occupy drama that we might learn from the actors and playwriters rather than ignore or dismiss a narrative which too often goes untold.

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birming-ham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Wash-ington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the mo-tel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sab-batical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organiz-ing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown to-day on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

The Martin Luther KingYou Don’t See on TV

In the early 1960s, when King fo-cused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publi-cations graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against South-ern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began chal-lenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including eco-nomic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a de-cent home, King said, anti-discrim-ination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Ameri-cans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class per-spective. He decried the huge in-come gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to re-distribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Media Beat (1/4/95) By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent op-ponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaris-tic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot peo-ple” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complain-ing about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national me-dia heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has

diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was orga-nizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Cam-paign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in non-violent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Con-gress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs pro-grams to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appro-priating “military funds with alac-rity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

As 1995 gets underway, in this na-tion of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of pov-erty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life.

Printed with permission from FAIR under a Creative Commons license. Original at:http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2269

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Amos 5: 6-7, 10-15Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain,you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them;you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time.

Exodus 32: 1-4When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ Aaron said to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, formed it in a mould, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’

Acts: 2:43-47All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

John 1:14

And the W

ord became flesh and dw

elt among us...

(literally, “he set up his tent in our m

idst”)