African-American Voice

Occupy! is a movement that has arisen "in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice." It's a phenomenon, perhaps more than a movement. The state of the world, and of the human race has grown so imbalanced, so deeply dysfunctional, so painfully self-absorbed by malign tendencies that  suddenly we humans passed a threshold beyond which our tolerance could not continue. So we spilled out into the street to demand attention to the aggressive imbalances we're all forced to live with every day, be they economic, racial, nationalistic, religious--the nature of these distinctions is far less important than our weariness of the game we're caught up in involving the necessity to grind down our fellows in order to keep our own heads above water.

We Occupiers are as diverse as the face of the entirety of humanity. And we're tired of fighting a losing battle against the self-centered ideology gripping so many of the world's institutions and interaction. We've come together to do something about it , even before we have any clue just what to do. We American Occupiers are coming at this thing within our established framework as a nation committed to law and Constitution, and struggling to absorb the idea that Occupy is not an American phenomenon, even though it stems from ideas we've been accustomed to supporting as Americans for a long time. We're weary of the gap between our ideals, the underlying philosophies of equanimity expressed in our founding documents, and our collective expression in the real world. We've come together, now, to splay all our discontent out in the open, to figure out our commonalities, and to demand both a reckoning and a rectification. We Occupiers are convinced that the time has come, that we Humans stand at a crossroad in our history, and that we must finally learn to live cooperatively, or lose our place in the history of a small planet in a cosmic sea....