Occupy Death
The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow. And if one day the whole world should be covered with concrete boxes, the clouds will still be playing up above, and here and there people will still, with the help of art, be holding open a door to the divine.
I have come from the city, where after a long absence I was once more among people, and I have sat in a train, seen pictures and sculptures and heard wonderful new songs by Othmar Schoeck. Now the joyful breeze brushes my face just as it caresses the nodding anemones, but as it whirls up a swarm of memories in me like a dust cloud, a reminder of pain and transience rises from my blood into my conscious mind. Stone on the path, you are stronger than me! Tree in the meadow, you will outlast me, and perhaps so will you, little raspberry bush, and perhaps even you, rose-scented anemone.
For a single breath I sense more profoundly than ever the transience of my form, and I feel drawn into transformation – to the stone, the earth, the raspberry bush, the tree root. My thirst is for the signs of passing, for the earth, the water and the withering of the leaves. Tomorrow, the day after, soon, soon I shall be you, I shall be leaves, I shall be earth, I shall be roots, I shall write no more words on paper, I shall no longer smell the regal wallflower, I shall no longer carry the dentist’s bill around in my pocket, I shall no longer be pestered by menacing officials demanding proof of citizenship, and so – swim cloud in the blue, flow water in the brook, bud leaf on the bough, I have sunk into oblivion and into my thousand-times-longed-for transformation.
Ten and a hundred times more you will grasp me, enchant me and imprison me, world of words, world of opinions, world of people, world of increasing pleasure and feverish fear. A thousand times you will delight me and terrify me, with songs sung at the piano, with newspapers, with telegrams, with obituaries, with registration forms and with all your crazy odds and ends, you, world full of pleasure and fear, sweet opera full of melodic nonsense. But never more, may God grant, will you be completely lost to me, devotion to transience, passionate music of change, readiness for death, desire for rebirth. Easter will always return, pleasure will always become fear, fear will always become redemption, and the song of the past will accompany me on my way without grief, filled with affirmation, filled with readiness, filled with hope.
53 comments on the article “Occupy Death”
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Anonymous
"Well in most nations in the world you would have been shot, you would have been jailed and tortured. You would have been clamped down so hard you'd forget you even had a pair of balls. "
Yeah, you made a wee bit mistake of forgetting to add the line "by the US cops, CIA, and military".
Anonymous
Lotus-eater?
LOL!!
Wait, was that nice of you or really rude?
Someone else will let you know, I'm sure.
Anonymous
Oh bullshit. Everything you wrote is total bullshit, you dumb right wing douchebag.
Anonymous
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/ted-rall/44201/occupy-wall-street-what-comes-next
I like and agree with Ted Rall but he's misunderstanding the encampments and the reason for them. They are/were rehearsals for the time when OUR anti-fascist forces will actually need to camp.
Anonymous
Just read your link. I'm a bit confused here, the author writes "Occupy has been overly inclusive. As a reaction to and rejection of the two big corporate-backed political parties, OWS was inherently radical. Yet for week after week, month after month, General Assemblies all over the country have been disrupted and hijacked by liberals, Democrats, and other traditional partisans who don't share the OWS ideology of non-partisanship and non-affiliation with Ds or Rs, and militant resistance..."
Well if this is the case then why the term 99%? Surely he doesn't believe that the majority of americans are outside the R/D spectrum and open to militant resistance. Why use a term that includes the majority when the original concept of Occupy was simply a minority reaction to everything that's been going on? If you don't include the majority they what makes him believe he can grow a mass movement? Is it that there was never any intention to have a mass movement? And if so then why is he surprised that the movement has grown ever smaller? I mean he predicts that there may arise another militant movement but that could just as easily be a right wing movement. I'm thinking of the patriotic, libertarian, white supremacist anti-progessive kind. I would appreciate an answer from anyone in the know.
Anonymous
Rall called for an armed revolution not a mass movement. Perhaps he's bewildered at the turn-outs his faithful rhetoric helped inspire. But, anyway, if 99% of the population of America is held down by one percent of the population - a percentage, not coincidentally, closely corresponding to the number of active-duty U.S. Military personnel - then it would take just one percent of of the population, or, us - defined as the fiercest of us - to run the tyrants off, allowing the remaining 98% to remain on the sidelines if it wishes. Maybe another one percent of us to be on the safe side and to account for the advance weaponry their side will initially have. But, after having taken a look at the absolute cowardice U.S. Mil personnel demonstrate in tactical operations in the Middle East and elsewhere, it may require less of us to send them to the gallows rope than we first might think. America's television-induced apathy created this Mil dictatorship so as Americans it is our duty to force the troops back home where they will face a less vulnerable, more technologically advanced, better fed, heretofore relatively unmolested fighting force than the ones they've been running over in the past fifty years. But time is running out, and if you've noticed, provisions too, and we won't be able to sustain a homegrown fighting force forever. The fiercest of us. Remember that. Hope this helped.
Anonymous
The new HBO production "The Newsroom" is chock-full of U.S. Military propaganda - mildly subtle and very false. For example, lead and sympathetic characters with contemporary U.S. Military backgrounds and praiseful asides for Stan McChrystal, a Process General- in-training and general pervert, pop up regularly amid the stilted and "liberal" sounding dialogue. As a U.S.Military controlled asset, Hollywood continues to lead the world in subordinating humans to cruelty and fascism via the television and movies.
Anonymous
The actors are second rate while the acting is third rate.
Anonymous
As well as consider what Noam Chomsky says/thinks about news management, the film 'Orwell Rolls In His Grave' is worth a look.
Anonymous
P.S: DISTURBERS OF THE DREAM
"The American propaganda system is not centrally programmed as it is in a totalitarian state. Instead it permeates the culture, the media, and the institutions. Individuals who point out unpleasant realities of current or past American behavior are often subjected to social pressures and treated as pariahs. They are disturbers of the dream." William H. Boyer
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