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In the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, few people truly paid attention.  Post modern hippies got a three month glimpse of grassroots organization outside of polished campaign of nothingness. Yet indeed, it was a movement that stirred from the fringes of society:  the poets, the drum beaters, the displaced college student, the alienated citizen, the ripped off investor,  the long term unemployed, the speech apprentice who wanted his shot at the podium.   It was kind of a head turner for me and other like-minded people of my generation in Los Angeles in 2011.  It was about people making sacrifices to be part of a community without any immediate reward.  One young student from USC, left her dorm room every night to sleep on the grass of City Hall to be among the people.  My friend Lionel Rolfe, author of Literary L.A., took the underground subway downtown to get a glimpse of what all the commotion was about.
 I was born the year JFK was elected which made me an unmistakable baby boomer.  I was born during the time where there was political causes not agendas.  In the last ten years I have witnessed the evolution of politics as it scales against the imagery of technically capable news outlets who chart votes and opinions with more weight than dumbbells, alloting more prestige to the human point of view that it really deserves.  I took a class at Cal State Northridge where they talked about political branding and imagery in the context of campaign planning.  It all seemed a bit phony and pre-packaged to me.   I left a radio network I hosted for 3 years because my co-producer became a Leo Tolstoy disciple, an anarchist, started calling Obama murderer-in-chief because of drone strikes and made homosexuality a religion.  Becoming middle age, I wasn’t looking for middle ground, I just wondered why the hell every American had to turn into something radically off the political charts that betrayed any measurable sign of a mainstream voter.  Tolstoy believed that a non-violent transition could take place in which the majority of the people would not require protection of governmental power and therefore, the existing government power would be reluctant to display such power.  However, a transition to a benign authority of the people supplanting government authority would take more than cooperation.   I am a government loyalist.  That is to say, my 1960s mantra and belief system was conditioned to worship people like JFK, his brother and Martin Luther King.  As a child, the TV reruns would come every year of JFK’s death.  He was a god-like hero to me.  Unlike my anarchist friend, I relegated in the victory of Barack Obama because I thought it would diffuse racial barriers, configure class division and make it unpopular to be a redneck conservative.    Being straddled between a Southern Baptist Church I attended and an ingrained liberal, I fought false expectations of the American electorate in hand to hand combat, sometimes with my pastor.  There was an 80 year old woman at First Baptist of Beverly Hills who worked on every democratic campaign since 1960.  The gay mayor of West Hollywood came to her funeral and spoke at a Southern Baptist Church.  My beef is not people’s loyalty to core causes but their lack of loyalty to leaders in general.  Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was momentous.  People did not understand Congressional gridlock so they gave up on the idea that something could change, hope could rise, ideals would not perish.  Yet America gave into their own selfish petty agendas.  They wanted Barack Obama to make things happen in the way a snake handling preacher would.  With that cynicism, America’s mood and faith in the elected official fell flat on its face.  The Occupy Los Angeles movement had legitimate goals such as: get money out of politics, return the Federal Reserve Board’s autonomy to the Dept. of Treasury, rectify crushing student loan debt, stop offshoring American jobs, end police brutality by improving investigation techniques.  Those issues are just some of the examples of real problems Obama addressed.  Student loans have been reformed and now students are able to pay what they are able.  Student loan management and awards have been transferred from the private sector into the Department of Education.  Yet terrible social division remains.   John Boehner is not Obama’s colleague.  He is John Wayne cut out rope slinger, ready to lasso the President at any turn.  Racial hatred has exponentially risen due to cases like the Jena 6, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown’s death.  People are lining the street with their feet in isolated police killings that rings the bell of Tolstoy’s warnings.  Pontificators like Sarah Palin make it an art form to dismiss any liberal cause as illegitimate.   Newt Gingrich was one of the few recent presidential candidates to present workable solutions beyond the cleavage of right and left wing vitriol but even he was unsympathetic to Occupy people who wanted to make a grass roots difference.  If Jesse Ventura got elected to the top office and swung his feather boa with a grenade then maybe America would wake up.  It seems like any issue in America becomes the forerunner to intolerance.  You can’t be pro-life without having any sympathy for pregnant women in poverty.  You can’t be neutral on gay rights, without being targeted as inhumane to the human condition.  You can’t support the private sector investment without saying capitalism as a whole is fraud.  I believe the American people really threw the towel in when 2008 Wall Street bailout generated the belief of special treatment to corporate elite and golden parachute executives.  Four out of ten houses in my neighborhood in Reseda, California went into foreclosure on my street including the place I was renting.  The homeowners didn’t even have an incentive to keep paying when the property value was less than the inflated loans.  No matter one’s political vision for the structure of government, America has become a hollow echo and a death camp for the hope of future leaders.   They sold Obama down the river before he could even put his paddles in the water.  Congress is a misrepresentation of special interests and divided single-issue causes.   Cohesiveness as a workable government has surrendered to each man’s pursuit of survival.  The price of everything keeps rising including the cost of unpopular, unwinnable wars.  Occupy Wall street tried to restore citizen concern.  Yet it died as quickly as it breezed in with blind eye police arrests and the expiration of city leases to support a cause with no end.  No matter the recognizable face of America’s next visible movement, it will hopefully bring the country not only closer together but present more possible solutions.  Occupy Wall Street had a chance.  But the city sweepers and clean-up crew didn’t stop to listen.  They were just worried about debris on the lawn.