Occupy With Aloha

Photo courtesy of Yes Lab

For many of us who are becoming uneasy with some of the problems associated with Occupy Wall Street, the rapes, the degradation of community parks, the shootings, the fear that it will become a haven for some of society's most violent, what we are most uneasy about is the possibility that the message will be lost. The message - that 99% of our population has been forgotten, left out of the American Dream, while the other .09% has amassed the majority of the wealth of our great nation. That Wall Street used banks like casinos and we are left with the carnage of their greed, an economy on the brink of destruction. What is left for the rest of us is massive debt and jobs that are no longer in our country, but in foreign nations that do not have laws protecting the rights of their workers, thus enabling them to sell us their cheap products, while we borrow from those same countries to pay our teachers and fireman.

Our politicians very often come out of Washington much more wealthy than they were when they took their vows to honor the will of the American people. They often do this with inside information that the rest of the country does not have access to - just as Nancy Pelosi and her husband did with a credit card company. Soft corruption, honest graft. Insider trading in the stock market. Writing the rules so that they do not apply to themselves! Taking information learned in committee meetings and using it to make stock market trades. The rest of us go to prison for doing many of the things our politicians routinely do to line their pockets.

So when I found this post on Synchrosecrets, I asked Trish and Rob if I could repost it in its entirety. Here is one man's very brave stand for the other 99%.

WE ARE THE MANY, NOT THE FEW

Here’s an interesting twist in the Occupy movement.

Hawaiian recording artist Makana was supposed to play a luau Saturday night – November 12 – at Waikiki Beach for leaders at an annual summit that is putting together plans for a Pacific free-trade pact.  The Obamas and leaders of 21 economies from the Asia Pacific were present. Among the attendees were Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Security was apparently tight.

So there they are, these leaders, doing whatever leaders do at a private shindig on Waikiki Beach, and the young man who is supposed to play for the Hawaiian feast opens his jacket to reveal a t-shirt that reads, Occupy for Aloha. The five-minute song in the video is what he sang repeatedly for forty minutes. Here’s the refrain I love:

“We’ll occupy the streets, we’ll occupy the courts, we’ll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few.”