One of the things I really like about Occupy (and I didn’t like this,  at first)  is that in its diversity,  it spans a whole host of issues,  and explores and imagines and , yes,  PLANS,  to bring many issues to the public,  and get those needed conversations going and providing the public space in which to have them (whether that space be “physical” or “virtual/electronic/cyber-enabled”).

This piece by Wendell Berry (whose name is often heard amongst Occupiers re: his contributions of a “land-based” economy, and the power that is harnessed by “the people” and communities and locale),  is an indicator of how a wholistic sense of justice is  growing in the Occupy movement.  This is as it is “designed” to be.  Communities,  particularly ones  which emphasize spiritual aspects, evolve as  a result of the diversity of ideas.  And in this context (ie. Occupy) ,  the tentacles of the “1%” are under the microscope.  Moving from  the prime target of “Wall Street”,  the “follow the money” theme is a dynamic undercurrent of the conversations at Occupy gatherings and websites and blogs around the country.

My grandparents were fortunate. They survived their debts and kept their farm—finally, and almost too late, with help from my father, who had begun his law practice in the county seat. But in the century and more since that hard year of 1907, millions of others have not been so fortunate. Owing largely to economic constraints, they have lost their hold on the land, and the land has lost its hold on them. They have entered into the trial of displacement and scattering that we try to dignify as “mobility.”

Even so, land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must. Under the rule of industrial economics, the land, our country, has been pillaged for the enrichment, supposedly, of those humans who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.

But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.

 

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More Berry from same speech:

The losses and damages characteristic of our present economy cannot be stopped, let alone restored, by “liberal” or “conservative” tweakings of corporate industrialism, against which the ancient imperatives of good care, homemaking, and frugality can have no standing. The possibility of authentic correction comes, I think, from two already-evident causes. The first is scarcity and other serious problems arising from industrial abuses of the land-community. The goods of nature so far have been taken for granted and, especially in America, assumed to be limitless, but their diminishment, sooner or later unignorable, will enforce change.

http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture