Hope is here with the OWS movement
by: Harriet Fraad on December 2nd, 2011 | 21 Comments »
Occupy Wall street has inspired a wild level of creativity which comes from hope. Hope is so badly needed in America. For over 20 years, we have been passively enduring capitalist abuse and blaming ourselves for our suffering. Antidepressant pill use has increased 400% in the past 20 years during which the 99% sink into poverty, and precarity.
People have been savaging the most helpless of Americans, their children. Over the past ten years, 20,000 children have been killed by their families.
I believe that there can now be a change as people stop blaming themselves and their helpless dependents and start building a better America. I am including three examples of our creativity so that others can share my hope for OWS creativity and real change all over America.
Find marvelous posters at http://occuprint.org/
Hear an original song on this video:
Here is another example of the creativity that hope has engendered. It is a magnificent afiirmation in our connection to each other because, as the video affirms, “We are the 99%”:
Enjoy!
Fraad;
“.Over the past ten years, 20,000 children have been killed by their families.”
The correct term is murdered. Couple not prepared to bring children into the world should use birth control.. it is a simple solution and better than blaiming the government for parents MURDERING their children.
sorry Don you’re displaying under education on the topic, yes the people are personally responsible but we all have our society to share in the responsibility since it shapes us as much as our parents and schools, if not more since all of the above are dominated by social mores determined by Govt. and Corporate values…profit is their only incentive.
Thanks for the videos!!!!.
It is good to hear Peoples speak up and speak out.
Our voices are to be heard.
“End Human Bankruptcy”an idea whose time has come.
Actually of the 20,000 family members who murdered their children, most were teenagers who had children. Although they are responsible for their acts, the US has fewer supports for mothers than any other of the 21 Western wealthier nations. As for birth control, thanks to the Christian right , there are only 39 counties in the US who provide abortion services. In contrast, let’s look at France. Childcare provided by Masters degree teachers and associate degree assistance is available from 7:AM to 7:PM every day for $1.00 and hour for children under 3. meals and medical services are provided. Children of 3 and over are in quality childcare centers with medical services. They notice if children have signs of abuse, physical or psychological. Tenn mothers or mothers with abuse histories are also assigned a social worker for the first 5 years of their children’s lives. There are excellent low cost subsidized for all and free for the poor, after school and summer programs. No other wealthy nation has even half the child abuse we do. They all have free healthcare and child allowances. School nurses give out morning after pills to girls who request them. Their are condom machines on the street corners. That is why the US government is implicated in the murders..
I LOVE YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND DEEPLY
” That is why the US government is implicated in the murders”
That was all very interesting until you wrote the above. I think that is just shifitg the blame for murder elsewhere. Condoms are easly accessable in the US, that’s where it firststarts. All though I support abortion rights, it shoud be an act of last resort. A mother bringing a child into the world should not do so on the assumtion that the goivernment will support them,. I hate to say it, but in the distant past I heard a pregnant woman express those very expectioins.Teenage pregancy is a tragendy for both the mother and the soon to be born infant. For the mother it is a lost opportunuity ot get ahead unless hse has perentla support and teh child wiill be born into a struggling family
At least you acknowledged its murder.I wonder how many of thoes motyhers who murdered those children ahd substance abuse problems.
On another note, a woman was found guilty of holding her diabled cousins, al minors locked uopp in a basement and she was pocketing their SSI checks. is the government guilty?
Harriet
” Childcare provided by Masters degree teachers and associate degree assistance is available from 7:AM to 7:PM every day for $1.00 and hour for children under 3. meals and medical services are provided.”
Can you show a source for this?
There are several sources a few are:
Shanny Peer, November 13, 2003.THE FRENCH EARLY EDUCATION SYSTEM. NY. French A,erican Foundation.
Barbara Bergmann, 2006. SAVING OUR CHILDREN FROM POVERTY:WHAT THE UNITED STATES CAN LEARN FROM FRANCE.Ithaca, NY.
Suzanne and Barbara Bergmann, 2002. AMERICA’S CHILDCARE PROBLEM. NY: Palgrave.
I wrote an article for the Journal of Psychohistory. “American Children, Who Cares?”Vol. 35 No.6. Spring, 2008
On another note, a woman was found guilty of holding her diabled cousins, al minors locked uopp in a basement and she was pocketing their SSI checks. is the government guilty?
That is greed and a horrible crime, Murdering your children is also a horrible crime. However, since it is teen mothers who are most violent and unprepared for children, our government bears responsibility in our poor sex ed programs, no easily accessible morning-after pills and abandoning teen mothers to go home alone, poor and unprepared to be alone with a totally vulnerable infant. There is a reason that the US has more than ten times the child murders than any of the other 21 Western wealthy nations. Excellent documentation is in 2 readable books: Anne Crittenden THE PRICE OF MOTHERHOOD, 2001,NY. Henry Holt Metropolitan Books and Sharon Lerner, 2010. THE WAR ON MOMS. Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons.
Harriet ,There is a sector of tye polpulation in France who don’t seem to have thiose benefist, Arab immigrants livingh in poverty on the outskirts of Paris.
Getting back to the US, I am sorry see that you do not believe in personal responibility. In todays world, having children is a choice. While sex education is importamnt in schoosl, parents providinfg it is even more important. Call it a bonding a parent-child bonding experience.
I also suggest drug abuse platsys a part in violenty crimes against children. Murders occurs do to a loss of rational thought.
Placing blame on the the government is no different that what te Tea Party has spent the better part of 2 years doing. it is simply a way to avoid personal responsibility.
One of my teachers, responding to a 911 call, spoke with a young girl; a minor I imagine. He asked if she might be pregnant? She said know. The response sounded to him genuine. He asked if she is sexually active, and if protection is used. Affirmative on both accounts brings focus back to question number one.
Granted their are cracks in this encounter, but young people often do what they want, do what they are told not to, and must be supervised or surrounded in comfort and luxury for best chances of avoiding dangerous activity. Distribution of wealth is who’s job? Exacerbating our weakness by strengthening temptation helps fuel the fire of our economy. This is systematic degeneration. Can you blame an entity for not taking responsibility? The personal responsibility I accept is as the citizen of a democracy, who has not provided an sufficient fix to such problems.
Yes, it is indeed time for the suffering masses to stop blaming themselves for the predicaments in which they find themselves. Those who should be blamed are precisely the people who run the international bankster-criminal syndicate known as the New World Order, annunciated tirelessly by the administrative fascist president George HW Bush, and driven to new heights by George W. and now Obama. Of course, these presidents were and are simply puppets of this syndicate comprised of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, the Inter-Alpha banks, the Sax-Cobourg-Gotha dynasty of the Anglo-Dutch royal family, and the Trilateral Commission/Bilderberg Group/Council on Foreign Relations roundtable groups (based upon the Cecil Rhodes template). It is this shadow government, this sinister network of interlocking cartels, that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks: get this straight, all you who consider yourselves leftists and progressives, for otherwise your efforts will come to naught; the same goes in particular for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which must not degenerate into the left-wing of the Obama 2012 campaign – as the Tea Party has degenerated into an irrelevant neocon-Republican mouthpiece. It is time that we break this left-right conditioning, and understand that our real enemy is this shadow globalist regime, bent on killing all of us if need be for the purpose of fulfilling their agenda of global genocide. Yes, these are genocidal, vicious, and hateful killers who are responsible not only for 9/11 and all these murderous wars of annihilation, but also for the 30-40,000 deaths that occur worldwide every day, due to starvation and diseases that can be treated for pennies. For saying these things, I may be labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” but the fact of the matter is that we are faced with a problem of conspiracy FACT, and the nascent mass strike centered on OWS must awaken to this fact, and fight the system itself in order to realize significant change.
I am glad that NJ has those services. They are a help. However, sending a totally vulnerable infant home alone with a teenager is a cruel burden sure to wreck 2 lives. Since America can afford over 7 billion a week in our futile losing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, we could afford all the services France has for citizens. What is most tragic for children is that people who are so disorganized and hopeless about their lives or so ignorant that they do not use birth control are those who are teen mothers.
I am bit confused about teenage mothers and support. Where are the parents in the equation. It is not as if teen mothers are living on their own. Governement assitance in raising a child should be supplemental not primary.vFamilies needs to be the primary source of support and that is really what te govenement has to mold its policy around, whether it be through paid leave or other services.
But here is the botton line, teenage pregnancy is a problem and hobbles young lives. We are not living in the days when birth control options are limited, Ideally a girl has to emerge into a mature woman before considering being responsible for another life.
Finally, Harriet, you might want to look closer France. It is a 2 tiered society with immigrants being at the bottom.There is severe poverty among immigrants and they live in the kind squalid housing project that had begun to be replaced under the Clinton administration.
First of all France is an unequal society. As it turns out they have about 1/4 of their children born into poverty just as we do. However, if you factor in social programs in both nations, France has 8% of it’s children, too many, living in povery. America has 22% of our children in poverty after our social programs. According to the meticulous statistics of Wilkenson and Pickett, America is the most unequal of the 21 wealthy nations.Our mothers and children have the worst conditions
Of course families should provide. Should does not matter. We have to look at what IS. The most lost disorganized and ignorant people usually have the most children. Fathers are nowhere in sight. 40% of US children are born outside of marriage. Teens do not plan for their own lives, no less their children’s. We have to rescue their children because they are a significant part of our future and the poor little ones suffer. Should we condemn them because they have inadequate parents? I should also say that their poor neighborhoods have the most violence and the worst schools. They start out at such a disadvantage. Also, even if their parents really wanted to provide it would be extremely difficult since they are not well educated and unemployment is the highest for them. The basic question is, should children be condemned because their psrents fail?
The Obama people tried to organize OWS into a cheering section for Obama who in his war behavior is more like MUbarak Obama. They refuse. They will not align with a puppet of the left or right.
I think that the corporate masters of war and wealth do not have a unified conspiratorial agenda.Their agenda, is as Marx said so many years ago, “Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and your profits.”
The destruction of our world is, for them, collateral damage.
I agree generally but on the point of unified conspiratorial agenda, I think comprehensive thought across generations of corporate banksters WAS AND IS necessary to have concocted and constructed a National and global pandemic genocide based on the accumulate (and moreso keep as many others as possible from being able to) principle
THANKS FOR SPEAKING THE TRUTH
Harriet, Just one other thing. i’m a social worker. My role involves fostering independence, not dependence. I also know that there is plenty of help throogh Medicaid for pre and post natal .Medicaid in NJ pays for abortions and birth control
I find it interesting and very telling that Fraad and don totally ignore the only sensible reaction i.e. from Robert Starnes. Fear or ignorance? If more people would care to know what has been going on for at least the past fifty years I guess more of the world if not only within the US would rise up.
agreed …nice to read from intelligent critical thinkers that know how to spell check too.
Harriet, I was fortunate to hear both you and Rick today on Pacifica. My call was cut due to time constraint so I sought you out.
As a solidly middle aged, never married, AA male with some college, progressive politics, extreme under or non employment, I fall into most of the marginalized categories you speak to regularly. Primarily extreme isolation. I live in a rural area with no convenient personal or public transportation. My primary social connections are the internet & Pacifica. I’ve lived like this for 6 years. Practicing music has been my source of emotional, mental and spiritual sanity. I grapple with emotional well being constantly. I also was raised by a mentally ill single mom, which to you undoubtedly speaks volumes. Since the OWS movement manifested my feeling of general isolation has diminished considerably in the knowledge that my plight is being shared by many and acknowledged on a meaningful scale finally(and again historically). It’s far from sufficient but most necessary. I’d like to open dialog between you Rick and me on any level, as I relate, enjoy and appreciate everything you both disseminate.
Can you offer any resources that are free, barter or very inexpensive for support on any level to help diminish some of my isolation issues. Thank you both for existing and sharing.