The Other 99 LIve Stream

by John Hamilton Farr on November 17, 2011 · 13 comments

This will be up for a while (Zucotti Park, Wall Street). To find more live feeds of #ows actions in other cities, search Twitter for “live stream.” There are many marches and demonstrations taking place right now all over the world. Use the small play button (triangle) to stay on this page:

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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

kenneth webb November 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm

My son-in-law is an organizer of the New York festivities. I hope he doesn’t get busted and thereby deported (he’s a Canadian on a student visa), but he’s got to follow his heart. I give him credit for that, but I don’t look for much to come from any of this. It has been tried before. It doesn’t work. Socialism is something the young and idealistic will always believe in (as I myself once did), but they will learn the hard truths as they grow older. You have the right to talk, but you have to earn the privilege of being listened to.

JHF November 17, 2011 at 4:43 pm

Boy, are you wrong.

And what is this “socialism” silliness?

kenneth webb November 17, 2011 at 5:00 pm

My son-in-law is certainly a socialist. Actually, he’d call himself a Marxist. Is that silly? Maybe, but he’s a stimulating guy to talk to, and he’s in a noble intellectual tradition. Ideas should be taken seriously, even if they’re wrong.

JHF November 17, 2011 at 5:35 pm

I just wondered why you mentioned “socialism” in this context. No reflection on your son-in-law. You’re a lucky father-in-law, BTW.

I’m proud of OWS. Friends of mine and I watching this with tears in our eyes. It’s a very big deal.

kenneth webb November 17, 2011 at 5:58 pm

What is OWS? Do you know? Does anyone know? I know what my son-in-law thinks it is, but some guys on CNBC (Jim Kramer) think it’s something very different. If it’s just about big salaries dished out to bank exec’s it’s really kind of trivial, isn’t it? It must be more than that. It must be (my son-in-law would say this) about taking from those that have and giving to those who have not. But somebody needs to articulate the specifics. You fail in life unless you deal with specifics. If this is done, we’ll see whether anything here actually works. I see this stuff as being in a noble but futile tradition, mainly espoused by the young who haven’t yet come to terms with life, seeking redistribution of the property earned by their elders. Then the young grow old, acquire their own property and no longer want to redistribute. Sic transit gloria mundi.

JHF November 17, 2011 at 7:24 pm

I think it’s about evolution. These are not ordinary times, and I’m really enjoying them.

kenneth webb November 17, 2011 at 8:33 pm: But, John, you are forever seeing these new breakthroughs, changes of consciousness and evolutionary moments of truth. You saw such a moment in the Obama candidacy. You see it with every hiccup and travail in the world. When has any of this panned out? You long for such things, and therefore you see them everywhere. Call me a doubting Thomas, but in my life on the planet none of these wonderful thought-experiments has ever actually come to a pass, though called for, predicted and devoutly desired by the young of almost every era, including my own younger self. That’s a privilege of youth, and I love it. But the weight of reality always descends, the minds of even the foggiest among us always clear and sobriety resumes its dull throne. And a good thing, too: Truth is more satisfying in its ineluctable solidity than the laughing gas of wishful thinking could ever be.

JHF November 17, 2011 at 10:33 pm

(Have to start a new thread…)

But Ken, all those things were real… ARE real. What millions of people projected onto Obama, for example, was as real as real can be. How has it panned out?!? Nothing ever “pans out,” does it? It’s a journey. The main thing is, which direction are you going?

But the older I get, the less solid “truth” becomes. I love that. It puts a smile on my face. My psychic energy level rises. I wake up refreshed and trembling in the damp pine needles, scratch my little brown nose, and go looking for nuts.

See?

kenneth webb November 18, 2011 at 8:20 am

Damn if you don’t sound like an idealist in the Bishop Berkeley tradition: it’s real if it’s in my head. Well, that too is a noble tradition – just one that isn’t very satisfying when you’re trying to figure out how to pay for the groceries. Some things do pan out, you know. Buying a fish at the market and frying it up – that pans out. Likewise with writing a book, painting a painting or just earning a living. I reckon it takes some psychic energy to do these things, but that’s energy that results in something measurable in the world. The energy isn’t the final purpose, it’s the cause of something more final – I will say more real – than itself. That’s what I mean by panning out. If OWS is about nothing more than communal feeling good, it may give the participants a certain amount of pleasure, but it won’t result in anything. Meanwhile everywhere in the developing world people are raising themselves out of poverty by concentrating on the essentials – education, work, family. In OWS I see a symptom of the decline of the West. In that you and I may be in agreement.

JHF November 20, 2011 at 11:37 am

You know, you really must get yourself on Twitter, then follow all the “occupy” hashtags you can find, like #ows, #occupy, #occupyCal, etc. etc. etc. Only then will you see what’s happening. There’s something going on that’s bypassing traditional media and spreading like crazy all over the world. Exciting and extremely gratifying. Kudos to your son-in-law.

kenneth webb November 20, 2011 at 6:51 pm: Let’s talk 6 months from now. I’ve had this same discussion with my son-in-law. I do give him kudos for being a child of privilege who cares about social justice and is actually willing to do more than just posture about it (which is all that most leftists are willing to do). He was arrested at the G20 demonstrations in Toronto. Good for him. He’s a stand-up guy, and I admire that wherever I see it. Is he right? I often remind him of Marx’s observation that history repeats itself – first as tragedy, next as farce. OWS seems to me to be farce, even if some noble souls are involved in it. But it is too early to say, and both you and I must admit that all we have is hunches based on our own accumulating experience of the world.
Reply

Jeff B. November 21, 2011 at 10:41 pm

Education, work, family, and government policy that ensures that these things “pan out”, I suppose. I might point out that (1) the U.S. now has the income distribution of a banana republic and that (2) that wasn’t always the case. So much for the assumption that their elders really “earned” all their wealth just because that’s what the paychecks and financial transactions say. Part of the point of “socialism” (BTW, is any attempt at social justice “socialism”?) is that the market is not perfect and that its injustices have to be corrected in order to forge a more just society–and that the laissez-faire market can’t be trusted to do that on its own. You haven’t even specifically articulated these Hard Truths of Life you keep talking about, though I might induce that one of them is “Work must be done”. Well, yeah, but if you think we should just do whatever you think our share is (which I’m sure you’re right about) and trust that the system will do right by us in return, I wouldn’t be talking about “lack of realism”. “Work must be done” is not an explanation of why these things *can’t* happen. Maybe you think they *shouldn’t*, but if that’s what you think, just come out and say so. Why is Marxism unrealistic? What does it to you, or to your son-in-law?

kenneth webb November 22, 2011 at 5:16 am

Jeff -

I don’t have much of a political philosophy, but if I had to put into a few words what I think to be the principal delusion of socialism it is the reliance it inevitably puts (even if in theoretical versions it claims not to) on the power of the state. For me the state is necessary but also a necessary evil: it will always foul things up, will always become bloated with bureaucracy, will always become power-hungry and suppress individual freedoms. It needs to be watched and guarded against, even when it claims to be doing high-minded things like regulating the excesses of capitalism and providing a social safety net. Anyhow, in my book it’s not all or nothing as between government and the free market – it’s a question of where lines can be intelligently drawn, given strengths and limitations of the systems, and also what the culture and history of a nation require and its people are comfortable with. Historically, Canada (where I live) likes higher levels of government service and regulation than have been customary in the U.S. That has a lot to do with our having never had a revolution here, with our being a very cold place and with a natural tendency toward self-definition which wants to distinguish us virtuous Canucks from the bad old gun-toting anarchic greedy-guts south of our border. (A cartoon view of the world has a lot to do with everyone’s political views, which is why discussing politics lowers the IQ of just about everyone by 20 points or so.)

The reason I go on and on about personal decisions in one’s own life is that this is really the only place where any of us (except a Gandhi or King) can have any sort of impact on anything. But I also like to see a free people expressing itself in political action, so, with all their delusions, OWS, like the Tea Party movement, are fine with me. Let all voices be heard in the public square!

As to social inequalities – I can’t rid myself of a habit acquired early as a young kid from a poor family: I felt an instinctive contempt for the rich rather than envied them. I felt too proud to admit I wanted their money or wanted to be anything like them. This sort of thinking was sort of hard-wired into the poor-white culture of the south, but it undoubtedly reflected a certain penchant of my own family and myself as an individual. The emphasis was always put on achieving personal independence, which was held to require economic self-sufficiency but was greater than that and involved thinking for oneself and living as a free man, not cherishing material goods. Though I was once very attracted to utopian forms of socialism, in the end these early defining years of mine won out. It’s almost always that way with human character, isn’t it?

So, in short, to me it is not written in the stars that growing up poor is an evil that must be eradicated. It has its uses.