There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

I was bumping around the web, reading about Andrew Breitbart’s death (did he really die, or is this another crazy scheme like the crap he pulled on ACORN), and I also found this Matt Taibbi column from Rolling Stone last November. Actually, I think about the Occupy movement almost every day.

Taibbi’s words make for a veery good read, and I’d encourage youy to read the entire thing. Take it in and let it sit there in your mind for a while. Then, ask yourself if you are like him and did you get OWS then or now? Yes, I think about Occupy all of the time. Each day as I get ion and off of the bus I take to work: how reliant I am on that transportation to make my paycheck, and all of those folks who have lewss ability to get by in our current system.

I think about Occupy too, as I read and write most anything about LGBT issues. I went so far as to call Occupy the way for people to now, today- get engaged in creating change. And I believe that.

I was at a meeting last week where someone I have much respect for was talking about the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and holding up their model of activism as if it was the end all success story. All I could think of was- how come we still have no inclusive Federal ENDA? From my perspective the HRC is just another symtom of what is not working, just as the banks are a symptom that the Occupy movement shed light upon.

Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

Sorry Matt- here is where you showed that you really don’t get it (yet). While free food may not scale up to work for the whole of our country and culture, what Occupy did was show that when a group of people decide to find a new model, and follow it, that it can and does work. The Occupy model was working, and working well enough that the Status Quo was so utterly scared of it that it had to get it all shut down.

The Status Quo wants us to all believe that the current system is all we have, and so we have to make thiings work within it, making only little tiny changes as we go. The Occupy movement demonstrated this to be a fallacy, and invited everyone to not only envision different models, but to experiment bringing them into being.

via How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News | Rolling Stone.