New York City, September 28, 2011:
IT almost seemed like business as usual this evening on Wall Street, at the end of another hectic day in the rat-race. Yet the presence of police barricades along the entire length of this usually jam-packed thoroughfare portended something rather different. And indeed, just up the street and around the corner at Freedom Square (a.k.a Zuccotti Park), things were anything but normal.
Being at the scene of the ongoing "Occupy Wall Street" movement didn't exactly seem comparable to being at Tahrir (Liberation) Square at the height of last winter's revolution in Cairo. Then again, America's financial oligarchs are not cut from the same cloth as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarek; they represent a different kind of ruling elite, one that is much more diffuse but, in the grand scheme of things, far more powerful.
It is because of the wealth flowing into and out of Wall Street that the this country has been able to exercise global dominance for the last half-century, which is in essence what allowed the brutal Mubarek regime to exist in the first place. And although that dynamic is changing as the influence of the US military-industrial complex continues to wane in relation to other world powers (i.e. China), the fat-cats on Wall Street and their political cronies in Washington DC in many ways today exert even more power over the average American citizen than at any time in history.Of course, this particular protest must be understood as part of a global movement, motivated in large part by the success of the "Arab Spring," but ultimately larger than even that; it stretches from Israel, to Canada, as well as other cities in the US (San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) and on college campuses across the world. As wealth and power have become increasingly consolidated among a relatively small group of individuals, logic would dictate that the masses will eventually rise up and demand justice --nothing more, nothing less.
Only time will tell how all of this will play out. But one thing seems clear enough amid the mix of activists and curious onlookers gathered in Freedom Square in defiance of business as usual on Wall Street: people everywhere are rising up and making their voices heard (despite an official NYPD ban on amplified sound-systems). The time for action has arrived. And as of this moment, there is no going back.
