We are 'Occupied'...but what next?

I admit that when I first saw the "Occupy Philly" protest. I was not so impressed with the gathering itself but with the traffic snafu it had caused that day. A few days before I did sign an online petition asking that Student Loan Debt be forgiven. It seemed pretty reasonable...until I was getting emails of every leftist MoveOn.org petition thrown at me later on. So my vision might have been a little skewed when I visited City Hall on Oct. 6. The one thing I knew for certain is that if I ignored it, I would have definitely regretted it.
I did not. I was impressed with the conduct of the protesters and the police. I narrowly avoided the 2001 Fat Tuesday Riot on South St. because I saw the signs of something bad about to go down. I never felt that vibe during the whole time I was at City Hall. I have a few humanitarian concerns such as food, shelter, toliet facilities. After speaking with my uncle, I also wondered who was paying for the police overtime because of the protest. Of course, we know the answers to that now. We are, in effect, paying for this.
It was after seeing some neighbors, Susan and Don Simon, who lived through the protest of the 1960s and walking around with my buddy Hugh Giordano, that I started to appreciate the goals, though unfocused, of this particular protest.
My friend, Lisa Lutwyche, puts it more succinctly:
(Note: Bolded emphasis are all hers)

""Occupy" is trying to expose this: there is such an enormous gap, growing every day, between the corporate bosses and bankers & the rest of us, that my kids who are in their twenties might NEVER know the comfort and stability I USED to know (before the bottom dropped out of my career). And, no matter how many jobs my husband and I have, we might NEVER again know financial comfort or stability in our lifetime.

We DO work. I work in excess of 50 hours many weeks, combining all my jobs, to say nothing of the 24-36 hours per week of graduate school work that I do...My husband has no health insurance, mine is 44% of my income (but I can't give it up if I ever want treatment or testing for cancer...since I had the audacity to survive cancer in the past), we have NO savings anymore, we drive cars that have both exceeded 200,000 miles and there's no end in sight.

THAT's what people are "marching" and "occupying" about.

Who made this happen? What became of the people who created this? They are better off than ever before, in most cases, and we are worse off than our grandparents were...and if our kids weren't born into families of corporate executives, bankers, or derived wealthy inheritances from the death of someone...they have little hope of a future.

We, as a country, don't MAKE anything anymore. Our manufacturing has all been sent overseas, and it's NOT the fault of the unions, it's the fault of the GREED of the the companies who used to make things here.

WE need to let "Wall Street" and "Corporate America" know that they are responsible, as citizen of a democracy, to the other citizens of that democracy.

Otherwise, who are we as a country? We are that wall of NYC cops, all in dark clothes with handcuffs dangling from their belts. We are the Cadillac Escalades, pushing in front of our 18-year-old Ford Tempos because "that's just the other half and I'm better because I have more money.

Enough. Can't we, please, get our equality back? Narrow the margins of net pay between the people who do the work and the people who profit from it? Can't we make things in America and get some faith in ourselves again?

That's what the people are trying to say.

Is anyone listening?"

There are people listening and who sympathize. Giordano repeatedly called this protest 'Democracy in Action" (I call Hugh Giordano, my favorite 'Watermelon Communist', because he is the spokesperson for the Green Party in Philadelphia.) But even he agreed with me that when all of this is over and the protesters go home was it all sound and fury signifying nothing?