99%, Follow the Money

A year ago, saying 99% would have meant nothing. Today many people recognize it as the mantra of the Occupy movement. I wonder how anyone can be surprised by what is going on in the USA. "The problem is not scarcity, it is distribution." So proclaimed my sign at the first Occupy rally I went to. There is no question that we are a rich country. So, follow the money. Any idiot can see that the great majority of our common wealth goes to the military and military related businesses.

I went to a bunch of school events to watch my grandsons in Portland, Oregon. Nice kids, nice schools, nice parents, nice sports, nice plays. The parents were all talking about the cutbacks in the schools. They are hurt and shocked and upset. The prevailing feeling seemed to be that we just don't have the money anymore. I tried to keep a low key tone in my voice as I suggested that with the cost of drones and attacking people all over the planet, and the cost of having very highly paid mercenaries all over the globe, and the cost of all the paramilitary operations we run and the cost of  the million and a half messed up vets returning from occupying Iraq and Afghanistan we could fund a lot of school programs.

"What is she talking about?" was the look on faces when I took the subject out to the obvious. "If we are a democracy, then it is our choice to be the country that spends more on her military than all the other countries in the world combined." We chose to be the country with 23% of her children living in desperate poverty. We chose to have crappy schools if you don't happen to be in the 1% neighborhoods.

Not one person I spoke with engaged in this conversation. It seemed to be a much more comfortable arena to moan about gym class cut backs and stay in a safe bubble. Everything is interconnected. As this gets more and more obvious because of communications, I think it has become overwhelming for many to face the implications of the information. If , as has happened for some years now, reports come from Yemen almost daily about drone strikes killing random people and our government denies it, so there. Then, when the government has to confirm because of overwhelming evidence, they say it is necessary and we go, "OK", and don't seem to wonder how many homeless kids each drone strike in Yemen will create here in our own back yard, to say nothing of in Yemen. Where the hell is Yemen? My taxes keep funding murder in places I can't even find on a map.

Maybe the new best way to teach geography would be to spend a year locating all the places in the world where we have military and paramilitary actions going on. We could find some of the more honest reasons in Wikileak documents.

I, for one, think the great fight with the best chance for a sustained win would be to feed, house, and educate more and more people, starting right here at home. I think it is all very simple. Poor people need money, hungry people need food, homeless people need homes. We need to put our hands and hearts together and do the right thing.