Rain and mist on the windows, the Netherlands.
House-buying bureaucracy has taken most of my time and energy these past couple of months. It seems I haven't had a stress-free moment to gather my thoughts about the remarkable events of 2011 and their impact on all our lives. Rebecca Solnit's article (excerpted below) is a timely reminder that what's most important is how we care for and respect one another. Please take a few moments to read "Compassion is our new currency."
"Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.
"The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”
"The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.
"The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves.
"Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.
"If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.
"Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins. One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children.
"We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in, and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage."
In this Christmas season and beyond, my fervent prayer is that compassion continues to occupy our hearts and minds - and we act accordingly.
PS - my son enjoyed this post also.
Posted by: Marilyn | 24 December 2011 at 19:58
Amen! Just today I was thinking how much it costs to run for political office in the US and only the rich can afford it. So of course they want to protect their money and really don't care about the other 99%. No wonder we have problems. Money has definitely stolen our vote. I pray that compassion over rules.
May the spirit of love reign in everyone's hearts this Christmas season. Blessings to you and savor each moment of settling into your new home. I hope the bureaucracy is past you now and your can enjoy 2012.
Posted by: Marilyn | 24 December 2011 at 03:07
"In this Christmas season and beyond, my fervent prayer is that compassion continues to occupy our hearts and minds - and we act accordingly." This statement fills me with hope for the new year. Why has doing the right thing become such an issue and chore for many? Sending many Christmas wishes for a grand holiday for you and David and your beautiful family.
Posted by: Mary H. | 23 December 2011 at 23:59