99 Percenters Gathering Strength

As Americans, one of our most cherished rights has always been the right to peaceful assembly. The question is when did this right come with so many provisos? The "99 percenters" protesting in New York City's Wall Street area have been getting arrested and even pepper-sprayed by the police for such crimes as disorderly conduct and blocking public streets.

With gas prices being what they are and so many people out of work, protesters all across the country have been supporting the "99 Percenters" from their home towns and have been suffering similar arrests and haranguing. I thought that blocking public streets and areas was kind of the point. How else are you going to get someone's attention, unless you're blocking their path peacefully, of course?

These people are protesting the economic disparities between the richest one percent and the vast majority of the population not among the wealthy. I don't think it is a wise decision on anyone's part to take these protests so lightly. Anyone who has ever studied history, and I imagine many of us have, will know that whenever the proletariat is fed up enough with the current regime and begins to organize, nations fall and are remade.

What makes this current situation even more volatile is the fact that people are identifying the richest one percent as being not only the cause of their financial problems (unwillingness to help by contributing more to taxes), but also as the solution (raising taxes on the wealthy). As the economic crisis continues, everyone involved needs to really listen to what the people have to say.

The "99 percenters" are fed up with both political parties, as neither one has offered any real solution to the problem. The movement seems to be gaining strength, not just in New York, but across the nation, though it has received little media coverage. What makes this movement even more explosive is that it seems to be moving without any kind of central leadership, and such "grassroots" movements always tend to survive attempts to quell them due to the fact that they are based on an individual's personal ideology, rather than a central doctrine.

The real question that government leaders and wealthy people need to ask themselves is this: with 99 poor people to every one rich person, how long does anyone really believe the poor are just going to keep asking nicely?