A Place Of Greater Safety In The 21st Century

Two newspaper columns caught my eye today. The first was by Warren Kinsella writing in the Sun newspaper. Mr. Kinsella wrote a column about dirty politics which is more or less like having Dick Cheney lecture us on abuse of the rights of the accused. I guess it's true, the biggest lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

The other column was by Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren. Mr. Warren, a self-professed Christian and convert to Roman Catholicism, wrote about the Wall Street protests. It isn't surprising that he would be opposed to the protest as he is also a well-known conservative thinker. I take no issue with that. What I do take issue with is his characterization of the poor. He wrote:

"the poor have their investments, too: cigarettes, liquor, candy, lottery tickets, wide screen TVs"

This is the kind of statement that proves we have learned nothing in the past 300 years. Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake." in reference to the poor and we all know how that ended. Mr. Warren perpetuates the mythology that the poor are spendthrifts without any sense of responsibility or human dignity. It is the same attitude espoused by Scott Reid, a Liberal strategist, who said a few years back that the poor would spend a child care subsidy on beer and popcorn.

There are as many poor who are irresponsible as there are wealthy who are greedy. But just as greed does not define all those who have been successful, Mr. Warren's characterization does not define all those who are poor either. Most of the poor and the working poor struggle to feed and support themselves and their families. They try to find ways to provide for their children in the hope that their children will have a better life. The poor are no less human than the rest of us simply because they are poor, something Mr. Warren's Christianity should have taught him.

As Mr. Warren and others, including Ann Coulter, have pointed out that the protests on Wall Street are not unified in either purpose or ideology. Ann Coulter calls it a mob mentality made up of diverse mobs. Both have forgotten the lessons of history.The French Revolution started with spontaneous and disparate mobs expressing their discontent in a haphazard but angry and often violent manner. It took Robespierre and Danton to harness that discontent and unify the different groups into a cohesive movement that became the revolution that toppled a monarchy. Too many today believe that couldn't possibly happen here or in this day and age. They're wrong. All it will take is a Danton and Robespierre to unify the discontent we are seeing all over the world into a political force and if there is enough anger from the "mob" and enough resistance from those currently in power, a revolution is not only possible, it is highly likely.

I for one would prefer to see change brought about democratically and peacefully. I believe a revolution would prove the failure of our society and I would prefer to think we haven't failed....yet. But revolution is possible if those who feel abused and oppressed believe that there is no other recourse. There will be no other recourse if there isn't a change in attitude by those who are currently in control of government and our economies. It starts with understanding that the poor are not necessarily poor by choice or through laziness and not everyone who lost their job or their home in the recession was irresponsible. It starts by understanding that there is something wrong with paying extreme bonuses to corporate executive even as they are laying off employees in their companies. It starts with understanding that government represents all the people, not just the elite.

There is a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots but it is not the have-nots who are in control of how wide that gap will be. It is those who have their hands on the economic levers that determine that, along with governments who squander tax dollars and then demand more. As British and French monarchs learned, as Hosni Mubarak learned and as Assad and Qaddafi are learning now, when the breaking point is reached, the anger becomes  action.

Whether it is from disorganized mobs or orgaganized revolutionaries is irrelevant. It takes on a life of its own. Both Danton and Robespierre discovered that but too late to save themselves from being destroyed by the very revolution they created and thought they controlled. We can dismiss the Wall Street protests, Arab Spring and Euro-zone tax protestors all we want but each outburst is telling us the same thing. The level of discontent with the status quo is reaching the breaking point. We ignore that at our peril. Marie Antonette and her husband Louis Capet, discovered that too late to save themselves or their way of life.

For those who believe that revolution can't happen here, in this modern era, think again. It may already have started and if it has, it may already be too late to stop it.

© 2011 Maggie's Bear
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