As spring rolls around, we are once again forced to put up with the foolishness that was the Occupy Movement last year. While this group had legitimate grievances, their protesting turned into a sort of whining miasma of petulant protesting for the sake of protesting - like an entire movement made up of three year old temper tantrums. Needless to say, the whole Occupy Movement needed a time out, and that's exactly what we've all be enjoying over the winter months.
But once again, spring returns and the Occupy Movement is back with a new slogan - the 99% Spring. Hopefully, their winter was a fruitful one and a time for reflection and a new strategy. Here are a few suggestions that I have for the movement on ways they can actually achieve some sort of progress.
First - DO NO HARM. I've always considered this tenant of the Hippocratic Oath to be a good first step for just about anything in life. If you can move forward without going backwards, you are making progress. The most effective protesting is always peaceful protesting. See Ghandi, Martin Luther King, etc...
Second - ACHIEVE SOMETHING. There are SO MANY THINGS that are wrong out there - pick one. Figure out a way to protest it, keeping the first idea in place. And then protest the heck out of it. In the past week, I've read articles about a Minnesota Hospital that replaced its front line staff with bill collectors so that it could collect on debts from people trying to access health care at their emergency room. What?! Seriously? I'd have an Occupy Movement right on their freaking lawn! Or how about the article the other day that talked about the sleazy, immoral, and probably illegal tactics of all these mortgage companies and banks doing robo-signing on foreclosure notices? How hard could it be to stage large peaceful sit-ins in their lobbies and parking garages? If nothing else, moving the Occupy Movement away from large family friendly parks and into places where these evil and immoral things are actually being done would also move the focus away from the protestors and towards the things being protested.
Third - GO HOME WHEN YOU'RE DONE. Look, even Jesus rested from time to time. MLK didn't constantly march on Selma. Ghandi didn't incessantly criss-cross India by foot and his hunger strikes rarely lasted more than a few weeks. At some point, you have to give the protests a rest and let people take a deep breath, so that they can agree with you and try to figure out how to correct these evils. If you are constantly protesting, then people are spending all their time trying to figure out how to make you stop protesting, not figuring out ways to actually address the issues you are bringing up.
These are my three simple suggestions to the Occupy Movement and the 99% Spring. I, henceforth, wash my hands of these radicals and loons... unless they should actually take some of these suggestions to heart.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Go Up, Young Man!
North Korea is quite the insular nation. They have closed their borders to pretty much anyone except China. Their people do not travel. They do not have any concept of the world outside their own borders. As a result, they are a dying race of static people living day to day with no concept of a brighter future.
As goes North Korea, so goes the world.
In 1944 when Germany started raining V-2 rockets down on England, the world woke up to the military possibilities of rocketry. Pretty soon there was a "space" race going on between the two leading industrial technology winners of World War II - the United States and Russia. Russia beat the United States by launching Sputnik and putting an orbital satellite in space first. This scared the hell out of the Pentagon and more money and funds were allocated to this strategic threat. We are still living in the shadow of Sputnik.
For more than 50 years now, our space bound technology has been largely tied to strategic threats. The only reason we went to the Moon first was to show Russia that if anyone was going to build a base there, it was going to be the United States. While it is true that NASA has been allowed to continue its existence doing scientific missions, the origins of NASA's birth and the reality behind its existence has always been quasi-strategic. If we weren't afraid of needing space ships to knock killer satellites and stuff out of the sky, we wouldn't need NASA anymore.
And yet, think of what the world has gained because of our "space" race, no matter the reason for its existence. Computers, satellites, cell phones, the internet, digital technology, wireless, fuel cells, etc... All of the greatest technological advancements of the last 50 years come about directly as a result of our ventures into space. Heck, if there hadn't been a space race, our schools wouldn't have upgraded their science and math classes and the United States continued dominance in these fields would not have been possible. It was our vision of a world outside our own that allowed the United States to grow and become the technological leader on this planet.
Now our fifty years of fame has dried up. At a time of economic crisis, our vision has become shrink-wrapped and bound inside our little borders. While we might not be as land-locked in our imagination as North Korea, we are every bit as earthbound. Our policies are based entirely around how to make things work now... not looking forward to the future. Technology in the last few years has produced things like... Facebook... Google... the I-Phone... a better 3-D film... Sure, we've also tackled disease and earthquake preparedness and cars that park themselves - but all of these things are designed to make life here better right now. Viagra does nothing to solve the hunger problems faced by 25% of the world. The proliferation of nuclear technology does nothing to solve the problem of over-population (though it could... in a hurry... unfortunately). Our brand new military aircraft, though very cool to look at, does nothing to alleviate our growing lack of resources as we strip this planet bare.
No, my friends, the solutions can't be found here on Earth. We need to expand our horizons. We need to change our insular views and start looking outwards again. We need someone with a vision to take the reins of our imagination and to lead us to a bright new future.
I'd much rather invest in the trickle-down theory of economics if I thought that there might be something incredibly new on the horizon. Putting half the budget of the United States into a project like a Lunar or Mars Colony would have repercussions for the world's economy that we couldn't even begin to imagine. But before we can do that, we need to have someone in charge that can rise above the petty challenges of today and see the importance of the challenges of tomorrow.
As goes North Korea, so goes the world.
In 1944 when Germany started raining V-2 rockets down on England, the world woke up to the military possibilities of rocketry. Pretty soon there was a "space" race going on between the two leading industrial technology winners of World War II - the United States and Russia. Russia beat the United States by launching Sputnik and putting an orbital satellite in space first. This scared the hell out of the Pentagon and more money and funds were allocated to this strategic threat. We are still living in the shadow of Sputnik.
For more than 50 years now, our space bound technology has been largely tied to strategic threats. The only reason we went to the Moon first was to show Russia that if anyone was going to build a base there, it was going to be the United States. While it is true that NASA has been allowed to continue its existence doing scientific missions, the origins of NASA's birth and the reality behind its existence has always been quasi-strategic. If we weren't afraid of needing space ships to knock killer satellites and stuff out of the sky, we wouldn't need NASA anymore.
And yet, think of what the world has gained because of our "space" race, no matter the reason for its existence. Computers, satellites, cell phones, the internet, digital technology, wireless, fuel cells, etc... All of the greatest technological advancements of the last 50 years come about directly as a result of our ventures into space. Heck, if there hadn't been a space race, our schools wouldn't have upgraded their science and math classes and the United States continued dominance in these fields would not have been possible. It was our vision of a world outside our own that allowed the United States to grow and become the technological leader on this planet.
Now our fifty years of fame has dried up. At a time of economic crisis, our vision has become shrink-wrapped and bound inside our little borders. While we might not be as land-locked in our imagination as North Korea, we are every bit as earthbound. Our policies are based entirely around how to make things work now... not looking forward to the future. Technology in the last few years has produced things like... Facebook... Google... the I-Phone... a better 3-D film... Sure, we've also tackled disease and earthquake preparedness and cars that park themselves - but all of these things are designed to make life here better right now. Viagra does nothing to solve the hunger problems faced by 25% of the world. The proliferation of nuclear technology does nothing to solve the problem of over-population (though it could... in a hurry... unfortunately). Our brand new military aircraft, though very cool to look at, does nothing to alleviate our growing lack of resources as we strip this planet bare.
No, my friends, the solutions can't be found here on Earth. We need to expand our horizons. We need to change our insular views and start looking outwards again. We need someone with a vision to take the reins of our imagination and to lead us to a bright new future.
I'd much rather invest in the trickle-down theory of economics if I thought that there might be something incredibly new on the horizon. Putting half the budget of the United States into a project like a Lunar or Mars Colony would have repercussions for the world's economy that we couldn't even begin to imagine. But before we can do that, we need to have someone in charge that can rise above the petty challenges of today and see the importance of the challenges of tomorrow.
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