Seancrates

Not my happiness, but just general happiness in the world. The ability to critically think will be the death of me. One of my professors from college passed this morning. Not many people who have been given the task of teaching actually force their students to think. He did. Now I can’t stop thinking. You want to know what I think about the most? How can I make the world happy? Then I start to think that since I’ll always think we’ll never be happy.

Why is getting a job so hard?

I’m not supposed to be in this position. My grandfather’s advice to me when I was 4 still echoes in my mind with every rejection letter: “Study hard, get a good job.” I studied as hard as I could but the second part has eluded me. I’ve exhausted every single angle. Personal references, on-line sites, walking right into places and asking if they’re hiring, and everything else in between but yet no paycheck is being deposited.

I look at the economy and I could point my finger but what’s the point? Wouldn’t pointing the finger negate the theory of the American Dream? The irony of doing something you love is that when you initially start it, there’s no money. I love what I provide for others, but my copycat tendencies don’t equate to riches. I think I know all the right answers, but I’m young so I think I know everything, but does that make me wrong?

How did this start? You vented, I offered my helping hand but I could never see the situation through your eyes. It’s easy for me to make a decision on your matters because it doesn’t affect my footprints left in this world. I wasn’t the one that would have to deal with regrets. It’s in my soul to offer solutions to issues that trouble your heart. This was defined from the moment I said “I care about you.” I wish my feet could fit your shoes, then I would know the path you have to walk so the words out my mouth didn’t sound so unfamiliar.

Sometimes I wish I were alive when the tactics of past movements were effective. I wish I could hear drums and gaze down the avenue to see a large crowd through the haze and believe that through this the ideals of morality and our country were upheld. Lately, it seems as though they do not. I looked at the fascination of joining causes. Popularized by just pressing a button to say if you like something, or retweet facts, is activism complete without the actions of active people? There’s a tourism like trance that occurs when I see people taking pictures of a march that I’ve attended, or at tents of the unemployed. Sympathizing is a feeling, not an action.

Now our society is tucked into an internal battle of maintaining the American Dream they have already attained, and the desire to become what brought it about in the first place. Fingers are pointed but the untouchables remain that way and the mob is relying on them to feel what they feel. But they’re part of the same cycle. So should they sacrifice what we could never attain?

She remembers how she felt that night when her heart didn’t seem to work. It stopped. It just wouldn’t pump any feeling into any part of body. Physically, she was fine, but her heart was ripped out. She remembers what the process was like. Shock, disbelief, anger, lonely nights, prayer, acceptance. Each step got a little easier, but it was a long process. It was said her new heart was surrounded by walls made of iron. Courters tried to knock them down but their weapons just bounced off the walls and  fell into the moat.

A new knight approaches. The one that had the potential to make her want the things she had before her darkest hour. The things that made her heart warm and working.  She wasn’t a damsel in distress anymore but still wanted her Prince Charming. Those walls though, are impenetrable from the outside. He whispered in her ear, “I can’t knock down those iron walls but I can make your heart so warm that the iron melts from the inside out.”

The melting process has begun.

There’s hundreds of people doing protests in New York City and even mock ones are starting to pop up across the United States, one of which I am apart of. There are legitimate reasons why we’re doing what we do. It’s not hard to see what’s happening. Before I became part of the actions of Occupy Baltimore, I was a part of the union busting protest in Wisconsin. Did you see the results? Yea, we didn’t win.  I worked my ass off organizing, marching, and chanting in Wisconsin and now Baltimore to make change. It’s the same formula: knock on a bunch of doors, convince people that they need to do this in order to change their surroundings, get them to come out to events, rally for about an hour and hope that some change is going to come. The only thing is, it hasn’t.

Besides a few union victories that I’ve been a part of (even some of those have been recalled), we haven’t won anything that has produced significant gains for the American people. All we’ve done is produced large amounts of people that come to a public place. Sure, you can argue that this creates awareness, some positive, some negative, but that’s about it on a checklist of things that brought us together. Every time I’m in a rally, I question our effectiveness. Is this group of one hundred people going to take us to the promised land? Even though our efforts in Wisconsin produced so much awareness and I’d even argue to say that public opinion was in our favor, the union busting bill was still passed. Wall Streeters sipped champagne while protesters camp out in front of their offices. In my opinion, the effectiveness of marches, protests, and people carrying hundreds of signs isn’t twitching that nerve in the people we’re rallying against that says “what I’m doing is wrong.” Spare the “who’s putting money in their pockets” arguments. Every one innately knows what’s wrong and what’s right.

What can be done to change this? We’ve become so “democratic” on the left that no one wants to draw the line in the sand, take leadership and make a list of demands. Or is it that we’ve become so dependent on the things that are provided from the ones we stand against? We can look at what is happening around the world and use that as inspiration but we also have to take into consideration that these nations weren’t democratic. I believe we need an old school attitude, with new school rules. We need people who can sit down on the inside with the necessary skills and change laws and policies. The marches, rallies, drum beating, and megaphone shouting hasn’t worked and won’t work until fire can be met with fire. I’m just tired of selling dreams to myself and to others.