Friday, October 21, 2011 — The Editor conferred with his spiritual advisors last Sunday; which is to say, he sat down with a couple of fellow ’Nam vets and their life partners and drank beer and talked for several hours.
These events are always their own reward, but something special came with this one. That should have been no surprise, since as it took place Wall Street was being Occupied.
The Editor was told in no uncertain terms that now is the time to hammer home relentlessly the idea — previously expressed in this space — that the people in each and every Congressional District need and deserve their own newspaper.
We speak here not of bloated wads of newsprint whose primary goal is to move shoddy widgets from cavernous warehouses into cheesy McMansions that are but one tenuous paycheck away from foreclosure.
No, we speak of newspapers whose editorial voice is as free as anything being said through the peoples’ microphone — newspapers whose columns are as free as Occupied Liberty Park, and the hundreds of other locations around the country and around the world that have declared an end to the economic subjugation of the 99% of humanity by the 1% who manipulate the world’s economy.
At first glance many people would no doubt call this an absurd proposal.
We would rebut that charge with these three data points: 1) Loyalists called the American Revolution absurd; 2) Apologists for corporate greed called the Occupation absurd; and, 3) Today we are publishing the 322nd consecutive issue of our newspaper since resuming regular fortnightly publication on May 1, 1999.
We would go on at greater length but our readers await — it’s time to distribute. Once again, we’ll be sending a bundle of 50 copies to Liberty Park, with our blessings.
Congratulations on your 322nd consecutive issue. You have consistently spoken truth to power and struck a blow for peace and economic justice. Now with OWS providing a tailwind, hopefully others will step up and strike a blow for the other 99% by starting their own papers. Time is short. In the words of Chris Hedges:
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.