Friday, November 18, 2011

BEFORE WE LOSE ALL PERSPECTIVE HERE...

Look, if this really happened, there's no excuse for it. I acknowledge that. It's completely inappropriate and unjustified:

OWS Protesters Chant 'Follow Those Kids!' As Small Children Try To Go To School On Wall Street

...In the middle of thousands of protestors yelling and chanting ... CBS 2's Emily Smith found little school kids trying to get to class. Nervous parents led them through the barriers on Wall Street. The NYPD helped funnel the children, anything to ease their fears while some protestors chanted "follow those kids!"

"These guys are terrorists, yelling at little kids," one father said....


And yet, as unnecessary and ill-targeted as this harassment is, how does it compare to what literally millions of American children endure every day, more and more of them in the past few years precisely because of what was done by men and women on Wall Street in our latest Gilded Age (which, for them, is apparently still going on)?

...According to "The State of America’s Children 2011," a report issued last month by the Children's Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children's well-being has been catastrophic....

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years....

As a report issued last week by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: "Of the 47 states with newly enacted budgets, 38 or more states are making deep, identifiable cuts in K-12 education, higher education, health care, or other key areas in their budgets for fiscal year 2012.... the vast majority of states (37 of 44 states for which data are available) plan to spend less on services in 2012 than they spent in 2008...."


It's awful to do what was reportedly done to those kids trying to go to school on Wall Street. But it's unspeakable to do what this society is doing to millions of children, and it's being done because Reagan/Rand attitudes toward taxes and government have prevailed for three decades, and because we as a nation have decided that the wealthiest can do whatever the hell they want and we should deprive ourselves to stake them over and over again when they screw up.

4 comments:

c u n d gulag said...

I agree wholeheartedly at how heartless we've become as a society. Especially in regards towards children of the poor, the lower middle class, and immigrants.

But, that doesn't excuse the actions of these protesters. I've been to my share of protests in a number of different states over the decades. If someone near me had started that stupid chant, I'd have asked them to shut-up.

Now, I didn't see the video, but is it at all possible that someone pointed to the kids and said something like "Allow them," and not "Follow them?" Of course, 'Let them through' might have been more effective. Everyone from the Mayor, to the WS rich, to the cops, to the MSM, has an investment in making the protesters look as bad as possible, so I take everything I hear with a very large grain of salt.

But that probably isn't the way it went down, which should be a reminder to anyone protesting anything that you have to monitor your every word, your every move, your every gesture. There is a lot invested in keeping the status quo, and any and every method will eventually be used to discredit you.
Don't give them any reasons.
Let them make them up on your own. And don't worry - they will!

Steve M. said...

Now, I didn't see the video

There's no video at the link, and there's none at the sites that have linked the story, including Fox Nation and a lot of other right-wing blogs. So I assume there is no video whatsoever. Make of that what you will.

But that probably isn't the way it went down, which should be a reminder to anyone protesting anything that you have to monitor your every word, your every move, your every gesture. There is a lot invested in keeping the status quo, and any and every method will eventually be used to discredit you.
Don't give them any reasons.


Agreed.

jazz lover said...

two wrongs don't make a right, but a better comparison would simply have been to the thuggish behavior of the cops who rousted the OWS folk the other morning. so they followed some kids. BFD.

Anonymous said...

"But it's unspeakable.."

I believe you meant to say "_And_ it's unspeakable.." Ain't no call for a "but" there. The one doesn't excuse the other. Kids should always be protected as much as humanly possible and there is never an excuse for harming, threatening, or even scaring kids in that way.