BRATTLEBORO — The people on Wall Street are cold, so I just sent some money for sleeping bags for the protestors in their dandy little plastic handcuffs.
In general, I believe in the religion of revolution. I'm going through one myself right now, which comes on the heels of a tremendous amount of pain. And pain, I've figured out, is really the only way the spirit or society can get us to revolutionize.
That mediocre place of mild satisfaction is an anesthetic that does violence to the soul. This makes revolutions confusing. We can all wish we were braless and high in the '60s, but we forget Kent State has been called a massacre, and that era was full of deaths, including a very peace-loving man named Martin Luther King Jr.
It's interesting to me that this revolution comes almost 10 years to the day after someone else threw a bitter and very violent type of their own revolution at that end of New York. Perhaps this is all happening now because we didn't wake up then, we just padded ourselves with a tremendous amount of fear and moved on.
* * *
This revolution is particularly hard because we live in the techno age where just about any fat Wall Street cat can be your friend on Facebook, especially if he has a blog that he wants you to read.
Back in the day when America was in revolution against those funny-speaking blokes across the pond, the rich people were just figureheads in palaces with diamond headdresses.
But this revolution is not so clear.
I, too, have stocks I am hoping will bounce back. I adore my broker, one of my very close friends makes his money working for a hedge fund, and it's easy to hate Newt and Perry, but on the whole I sort of love my politicians. I've been at parties with my governor, and Obama and Michelle seem like the couple next door that we keep forgetting to invite for dinner.
It's all very incestuous and hard to figure out. A straight line of hate - say, for someone like Noriega or Hitler or for a queen who eats cake - is easier.
* * *
Of course, the techno age might not be as random as it seems.
The lines to whom we are protesting might be more concrete than we think. If you Google “What Do the Wall Street Protestors Stand For,” you get that eerie feeling that suddenly Big Brother or the Pig of whatever literary reference you are making actually has a clear face: The first 10 posts are from Fox News, The Christian Post, and other religious right poopskies.
The biggest challenge these folks have to the movement is the idea that these folks don't know what they want. That doesn't bother me at all, because I know from personal experience that's the way revolutions start.
Revolutions are emotional. They often don't begin with clearly-thought-out agendas; they begin with a feeling of dissatisfaction, then anger and, finally, with desperation. Only then do goals begin to emerge.
A wife doesn't calculate her divorce. First, she feels depressed; then, anger builds. She gets pissed off, she throws her wedding china, and then she sits down and decides she wants the house and the dog.
In hindsight, it looks like those hippies, hopped up on LSD with peace signs on their foreheads, were just ending a war in Vietnam, but really they had to sort through a bunch of things that were wrong back then.
Our black brothers and sisters needed to be able to sit at the lunch counter with us, women needed more rights, we needed a complete turnaround of post-war values, and we were tired of being made to fight a terrifying war in southeast Asia.
* * *
I dare say a clear agenda is starting to emerge on Wall Street.
The nurses who marched last Wednesday want a financial transactions tax; others are protesting the injustices of the foreclosure crisis, still others are looking at workplace discrimination, and more are challenging student loan debt.
Librarians and teachers are out there, so you really can't doubt they'll come up with some reasonable requests.
As in most revolutions, it's the middle class who finally has the means and the intelligence to organize and say what they need.
Over here in Brattleboro, where it's legal to burn your bra and (until 2007) to bare your breasts, where art is everywhere and people grow armpit hair and shop at the co-op, we're all cheerleading the revolution.
Me, I'm starting a revolution of my own. Right now, it sort of looks like lazing around in my pajamas doing nothing. Fox News would have a real field day with that, but I have faith that revolutions have their own energy and their own agendas.
As soon as we manage to say aloud we want change, the universe miraculously springs into action.
* * *
I think about my grandmother. I'm sure she would get a huge kick out of the folks on Wall Street with their homemade signs. Not that she was opposed to Wall Street - she made a little fortune picking stocks out of the newspaper for fun - but she'd like the energy and the pizzazz of it all.
She'd probably go down there in her velvet housecoat and feed them all champagne.
If you want to send a sleeping bag to someone on Wall Street, you can do so online. One sleeping bag is only $20, the price of a good pizza and a Vermont brew.
Whatever you do, whether you are a tea party fanatic or a Wall Street protestor, don't live a life without revolutions.
However minor and pointless they seem at the time.