America is alive. It was designed to evolve and adapt the same way that a living system does. This was the truly revolutionary advance that made our Nation something extraordinary from the outset, it’s the open secret behind our unprecedented success, and it’s by far our most genuine claim to the collective advancement of the human species. It also happens to be the reason why thousands of people are now occupying the financial centers of our major cities, raising awareness about a variety of pressing economic issues, and insisting on radical change.

Our founding fathers were entirely ignorant of the mechanics of biological evolution, of course, but apparently they had enough common sense to understand that the world was just going to keep on changing as it has always done, and enough wisdom to try to incorporate that insight right into the very structure of their wildly experimental new system of self-government. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in The Declaration of Independence, in which our inspired founders eloquently recognized that every respectable government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever such a government becomes destructive to the pursuit of human happiness it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute in its place a system that is yet better suited to meet the renewed demands of an endlessly evolving and engaged populace.

In practice, it seems to take quite a long history of rather blatant malfeasance to successfully arouse and motivate the body politic, and perhaps this is for the best. Even Thomas Jefferson thought that big changes ought not to be made lightly, though he also noted that for the most part humankind appears to be disposed to suffer those evils to which it has become accustomed, at least as long as those evils seem easier to bear than the onerous burden of action. In other words, the People are kind of lazy, when you come right down to it, and it takes quite a long train of abuses and usurpations to fully engage our active attention. It has to get pretty bad, in fact, and not just bad in theory, but bad in real and tangible ways that have a strongly noticeable effect upon all of our daily lives.

 Well, welcome to the tipping point, folks. This is it. It’s nothing to worry about, it’s just our brilliant self-regulating feedback mechanism working exactly the way that it’s supposed to. The Occupy movement is an excellent example of the American People doing precisely what the framers of our Constitution had fervently hoped that the People of the future would do. We’re rising up to challenge a situation that has become fundamentally untenable, and insisting on the real and lasting changes that are needed in order to insure a healthy and dynamic economy, and in order to provide a secure and prosperous future for ourselves and for our children. 

Our economy is in one sense an ecology, and in order for it to flourish it needs to maintain a dynamic balance within it’s own porous borders, and it must also foster a healthy exchange with the larger global economy from which it has emerged, and in which it must necessarily play a constructive and balanced role or risk disrupting the very framework that gave rise to it’s own existence. As things stand, our economy seems to be experiencing the same kind of a crisis that an ecology undergoes when an aggressive non-native species takes root and then, in the due course of time, begins to take over. Nature’s robust system of checks and balances can fail spectacularly when a novel element is introduced into a fertile environment in which no potential competitors or predators are yet in place. Left to grow unchecked, the newcomer can and often does unwittingly crash its own niche, savagely smothering or out-competing all of its would be symbiotic relations in the apparently single-minded pursuit its own relentless expansion. Unfortunately for such organisms, they can only do what they were designed by nature to do, even when such behavior is clearly counterproductive to their own long-term best interests. Likewise, many modern mega-corporations were explicitly designed by men and women to maximize their own profit at all costs, and now they’re growing and metastasizing like cancers, bound as they are to follow their own flawed charters even in the face of certain evidence that they’re contributing to an unsustainable situation.

Gigantic corporations are a relatively new phenomenon, and so are multi-billionaires, and so is the Fed. There’s a lot of stuff that’s new. The internet is new. Novelty is a marvelous thing. It does have a tendency to produce that cancerous runaway effect, though, at least until the novel elements have been successfully brought into symbiotic balance with the rest of the existing system. That process in now underway. It is natural that this should require some cultural dialogue, because it is the tendency of any living thing to expand until it is limited by external factors. We can generally rely upon the powerful to seek ever more power, for instance, as history has so consistently demonstrated. Power, however, must necessarily evolve inside of an ecology of the relatively powerless, and when that power is not leveraged in the best interests of the masses they tend to become disaffected with those who wield it. This leads to conflict, obviously, and since the have-nots invariably outnumber the haves by a wide margin, the oppressed tend have a distinct advantage when push finally comes to shove, so to speak. The wonderful thing about the United States is that it’s set up to accommodate such revolutions peacefully. We get to hold up signs instead of having to bust out the guillotines and so forth. We don’t have to kill our tyrants in America. Nobody has to die at all, in fact. Because the government answers to us, get it? And yeah, it has to answer to the rich and powerful people, too. But there are a lot more of us than there are of them, and every single one of us gets the exact same number of votes as the big shots do. All we have to do is convince enough people to give a damn, and the deed is essentially done.

So what do we want? The framers of the Declaration of Independence wrote out a long litany of complaints, some of them more relevant than others. The Occupy movement has a laundry list, too, and it’s now in the process of sorting out it’s priorities. Generally speaking, though, what we want is meaningful economic reform. We want to bring the system back into balance. We want to adjust for what we’ve learned about how some of these new entities behave, because we originally set them up as sort of an experiment, and that experiment has been running for a long enough time now that we can start to assess what’s working and what’s not working. One thing that’s obvious is that we can’t just let the winners make the rules, because if we did that we would end up with a broken game that’s no fun for anybody to play. Corporate power needs to be more elegantly integrated into the intricate system of checks and balances that keeps America vital. The rich need to be reminded that this is a Democracy, not an Oligarchy, and that their power, though very real, has very real limits and comes with very real responsibilities. Banks and insurance companies can no longer be allowed to essentially trick American citizens into bogus arrangements on purpose, not just because it’s unfair to the suckers, but because we’ve seen that situations like the credit crisis end up hurting the whole country in the long run. We’ve got to stop robbing the future for short term gain. No, really. We’ve got to stop! This means that we’ve got to stop cutting education, we’ve got to stop raping the environment, and we’ve got to stop warmongering in the pursuit of cheaper resources. We’ve got to bring back the middle class. We’ve got to get the debt down. We’ve got to create jobs. We’ve got to fix social security. We have to make more intelligent provisions for healthcare… The list goes on. In the end we’re going to have to retrofit the whole enchilada, essentially, because as it stands the economy only functions properly when it keeps growing all the time, and the planet that we live on is a closed system. Business as usual, therefore, is entirely off the menu. Something is simply going to have to change. A lot of things are going to have to change, actually.

Fortunately, our Nations autoimmune response just recently kicked in. The Occupation of Wall Street and the global movement that it has engendered are certain signs that People are waking up to the fact that some serious adjustments need to be made. And maybe they don’t know exactly what it’s going to take yet, but they’re actively in the process figuring it out. In the meantime they’re raising public awareness by demonstrating, which is probably the best thing that they could do at this point.

The founding fathers would resoundingly approve of the Occupy Movement. It shows that’s they system is working, not that it’s broken. It’s an excellent indication that that America is alive and well, in fact, and that it’s well on it’s way to becoming even better.

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Written by The Teafaerie, October 10, 2011.  Feel free to use it, please credit and let me know.

Image ganked from Ann Elliott Cutting http://anncutting.photodeck.com/

Contact me: ruespieler@yahoo.com