Independent Thought

Uncovering the Wall Street Protest

So there’s a HUGE protest going on in New York City. Did you know that? It’s in it’s second week, and has gotten incredibly little to no news coverage on American mainstream media. I first learned about it through word of mouth, and even then I had to go to a British news site to learn anything about it. Since then a friend of mine also linked me to a Facebook page that is constantly feeding out information and links to small websites and blogs with bits of current information. I have seen videos of violent arrests and mace attacks on unsuspecting women. I have seen live footage where people pleaded for medical care for the violently arrested victims locked up in jail. Right before I started writing this, I joined a surge of people in the protest network spreading phone numbers for major news networks trying to get hem to cover the story. Since then, articles have been released online by some of the major news outlets. I watched it happen. 

So what is it that all these people are protesting exactly?

It’s clear that the people involved are tired of our economic system, that much is obvious without very much digging. But even on the protest’s ‘official’ website (https://occupywallst.org/), it’s hard to get a bead on what exactly the protestors are trying to make happen. Here’s their mission statement: 

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“Reasonable Doubt”

“Reasonable doubt”. It’s a phrase most are familiar with in regards to the criminal justice system. It started with early British Christians who were wary of taking judgement upon another person- something which they felt was only God’s place to do so. By the 1780’s it became a standard beyond which all guilty convictions must be held- something the American justice system didn’t hesitate to officially adapt. Today, when an American juror is instructed the legal rules of how to decide a criminal case, they are told to apply this standard of being ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’. The rule is there specifically to preserve the court’s “Presumption of innocence”. Basically, it’s what makes everyone innocent until proven guilty. This system was originally meant to to protect innocent people from conviction. This system has failed.

Troy Anthony Davis has been sentenced to death. As much as I would like to, I’m not going to tear into the moral hypocrisy of the death penalty right now. Because right now I think it’s more important that people know his story.

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The Reason for Dissent

There have always been problems in our society, and nobody disagrees with that. Over time, these problems have remained relatively the same for a good 80-90 years. Of course, we’ve done great things over that period of time as well. I don’t think that as a species we’ll ever stop doing amazing things unless we are destroyed by nature or ourselves. What makes me (and others like me) stand apart from the decades old stereotype of dissenter is the time period we specifically live in. Consider how complicated everything is right now. Society involves far more complexities now than it ever has before, and a lot of that is because of things that have happened within my lifetime. Cellphone use. Internet. Social Networking. Camera’s in nearly everybody’s hands. Public music sharing. Outsourcing. Importing. Exporting. International relations. All of these things are the way they are now because of developments that have occurred within the last twenty years. It’s significantly complicated things by massively increasing the level of communication and community we have. Suddenly, things all over the world have effects that can travel any distance in nearly an instant. Of course humanity as a whole has been moving in that direction since we first started creating empires back in ancient history. Now we’re here though, and there is a critical flaw in how our society is using it. The flaw stems from the base of most of this nation’s problems over the last century. 

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Why the U.S. Government probably lied about Osama bin Laden.

When people hear “conspiracy”, they normally think of shadow governments, impossibly complex plots, Illuminati, or Matt Damon. The word is associated with a stigma of irrational thoughts and paranoia that generally makes a lot of people automatically shut down whenever they start to hear anything even resembling the concept. I can’t say that I blame them. From chemtrails to lizard people, there are any number of ludicrous conspiracy theories that really aren’t worth any of the stress and time people put into them. Yet still they do, and there will always be people who subscribe to them for one reason or the other.

That’s not to say that conspiracies don’t happen- sometimes they totally do, and they end up getting revealed for different reasons. One famous example was the CIA’s project MKULTRA, which experimented with the idea of brain manipulation and control- particularly with LSD.

It’s important to realize that conspiracies do happen occasionally. I don’t think that they are the complicated, ambiguous, and open-ended plots that many people associate them with, though. In fact, sometimes they are done with arguably good intentions.In this case, it can cease to be a ‘conspiracy’ by definition, as that would imply “A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful”. Keep this in mind, because it’s an important part of what I’m going to say. 

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