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Thingish Things

What OWS Demands

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Oct• 17•11

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were busy deliberating throughout the weekend about what demands, if any, they should place on the world, lest, as one of them aptly put it, the movement becomes perceived as “a joke.” No decision, unsurprisingly, was arrived at, but the debate reportedly continues.

Pardon me for interjecting – I have no standing with the protest committee – but I have a patently unoriginal suggestion that I believe may help.

Here is the central demand: Men (and women) should do unto others as they would have others do unto them.  That is, people and their businesses should begin treating one another kindly and fairly on an individual basis.  

This is something we used to learn in churches and synagogues — those edifices across the Western world transformed by the hundreds into condominiums and night clubs.  The values once learned therein are now painted on cardboard signs, in the hopes that one government or another will codify them.  That doesn’t work.  The law of man has always been used as a boundary around which the clever can shimmy. Indeed, the letter of that law can be as porous as a Wall Street barricade.  

The spirit of the law is what these young protesters seem to be after, and that cannot be written in ink; that needs to be internalized. Greed and unscrupulousness have been around since the dawn of time. They will not be legislated away. Our baser instincts can only be quelled in the heart.  

Most of what we are seeing in these protests is pure professional rabble-rousing now.  The public employee unions have largely taken over, and they will have very specific demands.  But I can’t help but see in some of the younger faces a yearning for the basic moral values that have been drummed out of us by the secular gods. If it wasn’t so frightening and maddening to watch, it could almost be heartening.  

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