I started this blog as a creative outlet to ease my mind while I was trapped behind a desk, which is not my natural habitat. I owe many thanks to y'all for sticking with me throughout the tangents that I tend to wander down. Today, I want to get back to my roots.
Back in February, I declared that my office monkey days were over. ...I spoke too soon. After 6 weeks of traveling and auditioning and whatnot, I landed back in my new baby-sized studio apartment and within a week was back to my old office monkey tricks to get rent money. This time around the office madness set in with a vengeance almost immediately.
I work for a nonprofit. I was initially very excited about that. The NELA Center for Student Success runs a program that mentors underserved high school students through the college application process. Here's the thing, though. The center is a subsidiary of NELA, a nonprofit student loan guarantor, which is a subsidiary of USA Funds, which is a nonprofit with a generalized mission statement about helping people pay for college. All of these things are "affiliates" of Sallie Mae.
What it boils down to is this: The people at the NELA Center are working to get kids into college who are at a disadvantage. But every single decision, action, or thought that these people have regarding the work they are doing with these kids has to make it all the way up this massive chain of corporate command and back down again before anything can actually be done. And the further things go up the corporate chain, the less anyone knows about the actual work being done on the ground floor. There are only two employees at the Center--One to run the Center, and one to run statistics and numbers on everything being done here to report back to Corporate that the Center is "efficient" in helping people. The worst part is my sneaking suspicion that all of these nonprofits are actually only tax write-offs for some fat cat at Sallie Mae. I'm just real tired of Corporate America, I'm bummed to realize how insidious it is even in the nonprofit world, and I'm frustrated to witness how corporate busy work is utterly crippling for actually getting anything done.
Maybe it was this office madness that drove me to plug in to the Occupy movement this last weekend. As some of you know, I've been intrigued by Occupy ever since it started, but somewhat cautious and skeptical. So when I heard about the 99% "Spring Training" being held all across the country last week, I decided to go hear about Occupy from the horse's mouth, if you will.
What I found out is that we are on the same page: All the political and economic power in this country is concentrated in a tiny group of people that operates well above our heads. Mega-corporations run our food system, our housing market, our financial system, the military-industrial complex, and global manufacturing, and they tend to pour enough money into our Legislature to shape government policy in a really gross way to their own advantage. They have all the same rights as individual human beings but none of the sense of personal responsibility.
My major qualm with Occupy was that it was a protest without a list of demands. I was annoyed because I could tell they were pissed about something but they didn't seem to know what they actually wanted. Now, I think the problem is so deeply engrained in the fabric of our society that it's too early in the movement to have a specific list of demands. Could you even imagine an America without foreign oil and high fructose corn syrup? Or massive personal debt? Or looming environmental catastrophe? Or invasive, poorly-justified wars in foreign countries? What would that even look like? If you are protesting the construction of a dirty coal plant, and I am protesting government subsidies of Monsanto corn crops, and she is protesting cuts in public education, and he is protesting for labor rights, then we are all essentially protesting against the same system. Occupy has pulled back, regrouped, and is training people to take effective non-violent direct action on grassroots issues that they care about. Rosa Parks style. It's a long-term, big-picture vision of how to take back this country bit by bit, and I think I'm ready to say that I am the 99%.
No comments:
Post a Comment