From East to West. ‘Occupied’. (I)

I once held a theory that what motivated people to vote was merely a perverse sense of competition perpetuated by the two-party system, and that most of us had little to no idea what the candidates represented or what they planned to do, and that we were instead attracted mostly to the idea of the man or woman running.

I think that most people really want things done for them. They don’t want to put forth the effort in finding out what the candidates will do once in office, just like so many people didn’t care to research a bit more and see that Barack Obama in fact did not want to raise their taxes but planned to instead lower them and enact polices that would actually benefit the majority’s economic interests, or that he was an American citizen who was actually born in America and who in fact, like a strong majority of Americans, was a practicing Christian.

It’s no phenomenon. This is just an example of the kind of thing that has been going on throughout human history; and it is a testament to the power of fear, no doubt, for fear is the greatest weapon in all of human interaction, as that history has repeatedly proven.

Yet I often wonder how possible it would be to invoke fear in the masses without a certain foundation, an aspect that I’ve lately viewed among the most overlooked and most crucial of the human mind, or at least of the collective consciousness. Irreverence. How great is the link between the mass’ great fears and its capacity for irreverence?

The link between the two, I’ve long believed, is profound. I believe that it is irreverence that allows a people to be afraid, and thus manipulated by those invoking the fear. If the masses never truly inform themselves and are fed soundbites and mere snapshots–many of which have been photoshopped–meant to represent the truth, or a piece of it, or a version of it, or the truth in a nutshell, they set themselves up to be easily deceived, and controlled.

“Red light means stop, green means go. Good? Good. So when I lift this green light, everybody hit it! Got it? Good?”

And no one thinks about why red means stop or how it got that designation, or whether there are other shades to consider, because their attitude toward the truth is far less proactive than reactive; and so lies the great principle in the ongoing relationship between the few and the many, a principle that has echoed from the days of Ancient Rome and well into the modern day between the elites and the masses; between the richest, most powerful men and women in the world, a mere one percent of the world’s population, and the rest of us. The 99 percent.

But today and for the past month I’ve seen the first signs of people breaking that barrier, I’ve seen young people grow in number on the streets of New York City and proclaim their outrage at those who invoke the fear, at those who have maintained a lie to keep themselves increasingly powerful while the majority, they hope, continues along its mindless, abusive path of constructed inferiority.

This past month has shown the first signs of awakening among those who’ve long been trapped in a thirty-year catatonia; an awakening to the fact that change cannot be brought by any one man or woman or political party, and that no greater power lies in that of the majority, in that of the people.