Towers of Babble
September 28, 2008
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By Cyd Malone
(Wyandanch, N.Y.) Walk amongst the poor and dispossessed and there you will find God, so I’m told, and last Thursday’s rally in New York City protesting the $1 trillion bailout for Wall Street found me surrounded by them. In this instance, God had taken the form of a gray bearded, scruffy lunatic bellowing into a bullhorn. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Like all such rallies, it was a small time affair of three hundred or so people, most of them proponents of America’s minor league political parties. Socialists, communists, green party, 9-11 Truthers, and the now ubiquitous twenty something with the Ron Paul button all mashed together over a common outrage. I collected a tree’s worth of photocopied leaflets, one of them a helpful lyric sheet entitled a simple, cringe inducing “chants”. The moment I heard a voice ask, “can we get a chant going?” I beat a hasty retreat to the fringes.
The crowd was ill kempt, loud, obnoxious but peaceful, so the tourists felt it safe to approach and take pictures. The ever-present presence of the New York Police Department lurked well armed and silent, deployed at the ready about the chanting mob, but left the protestors alone. A huddle of four people all sported bright, fluorescent hats that declared each to be a member in good standing with the “National Lawyers Guild Observers Team”. A pamphlet handed out advised you to write the observer’s phone number on your arm.
The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith once noted that nothing warms the human heart more than to meet like-minded others, and the crowd was in a friendly, chatty mood, even with a man who, as one woman stated, “looked like a Wall Street banker”. Which I am.
I strolled from person to person, chatting up the outraged, asking why they had come down. The average opinion, the most popular frame of reference of most, can be summed up best by a funny and inadvertently dead on placard one protestor was holding - it read “No Socialism For the Rich Until We Get Ours”.
Not understanding that the poor and powerless are never in a position to demand anything, these people are condemned to a lifetime clad in cheap t-shirts and ripped jeans, angrily looking for handouts in a babbling, chanting chorus of conflicting, escalating demands, always to be infuriated when election day Santa Claus yet again turns into the Grinch.
The overwhelming majority of the protestors were faithful adherents to the socialist dream – of a benevolent dictator with an endless pot of goodies - a reactionary vision that choked on its own blood in our last century. They are correct to oppose this bailout; they are incorrect as to why. They disagree here with the purpose, but they agree with the act. They do not demand that the looting come to an end; they demand that the spoils rain down on their pet causes, which mostly involve themselves. They miss the principle at stake here.
As I left the rally, off to catch my train, the gray bearded, scruffy lunatic with the bullhorn noticed me and my thousand-dollar suit walking past. “No bailout for Wall Street!” he screamed, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “Not one cent, and let the chips fall where they may!”
Despite being the target of his anger, as I passed through beautiful, tiny Bowling Green Park I silently applauded him. If only Congress had the sense of justice, outrage, and inadvertent economic sense of that lunatic, we’d all be better off for it.
Posted by News LI Editor · Edited by Brianna - Filed Under Society
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News Comments for this Article
2 Responses to “Towers of Babble”
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What a sad mental picuture you painted.
Peasants with their tin cup at the kings door..is what comes to my mind..
the king comes out and says he wants more tax, throws them some straw and tells them to turn it into gold or die.
Groups of Peasant People who are at the mercy of their greedy king will become larger and larger in time..we know the rest of the story, don’t we?
- Posted by: jj
What a sad picture - I think it leaves the reader searching for that place realism and optimism - between strict justice and moving on.
- Posted by: Sam Sutter