Visions of the Left

By Tom McLaughlin
Oct 13, 2011 12:05 am

The left is on the ropes. Their Keynesian tactics to “revive” the economy are making it far worse instead. Conservative Tea Party types pushing the Republican Party to the right and taking over the House of Representatives are making it difficult for tax-and-spend liberals to continue on their road to bankrupting the country. The Supreme Court is poised to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. President Obama is sinking in the polls. The European Union, the ideal welfare-state leftists used as a model for decades, is disintegrating. Pundits claim that if the election were held tomorrow, Democrats would lose the Senate and the White House too. They took over everything in 2008 and they’re going to lose it all in 2012, so what is the left doing? They’re trying to start a left-wing tea party called “Occupy Wall Street,” or OWS.

One of OWS’s catalysts is Van Jones. Remember him? He was President Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar.” He was going to turn America’s energy economy around to wind mills and solar panels, lower the oceans and defeat capitalism. Then he was forced to resign when people began realizing he was a nut case. He was a “Truther” who believed America orchestrated the September 11th attacks and he was a communist. He announced to the Mainstream Media his “American Autumn” which was going to “rebuild the dream” of America in the spirit of the Arab Spring. He described the “phony, made-up deficit stuff” as if our bankrupting $14 trillion debt didn’t exist. “If we could pass the president’s jobs bill ... ” everything would be all right. He wants 99 percent of Americans to tax the richest 1 percent and spread the wealth.

OWS’s unique brand of weirdness is coming to a city near you if it’s not there already. Do they know what they want? A perfect world, it looks like. Some want to plant trees. Others want free colleges and forgiveness of five and six-figure student loans they ran up as gender studies and queer studies majors. They certainly weren’t math majors or they’d know that if we took all the income of the richest Americans, we could run our federal government for less than three months.

Others want the homeless to be given homes. Many are just strange-looking, smelly, dreadlocked, pierced, tattooed freaks. They’re the social/political, left-wing equivalent of, evolutionary-throwback, agricultural types one sees at Fryeburg Fair. They make you wonder where they go the rest of the year. They can’t possibly work; who would hire them? A head shop? A punk-music group? A marijuana farm? They followed the Grateful Dead for years until Jerry Garcia died, and now they’ve found something else to do.

Others are trust-fund babies, left-over hippies who believe in governing by consensus in long meetings in which everybody feels safe to talk about their feelings. Drudge posted an example of what OWS calls “collaboratism” from Atlanta. “Occupy Atlanta” discussed allowing Congressman John Lewis to speak. A leader with a microphone spoke in three-word cadences so that the entire consensus-cult could chant in repetition everything he said. They used weird hand gestures to communicate consensus or lack thereof. Others took turns speaking in the same creepy cadence — which were, again, repetitively-chanted by the group, while Congressman Lewis waited and watched. The expression on Lewis’s face indicated he felt just as freaked out as I did watching the spectacle on You Tube. Ultimately, they decided against letting Lewis speak and he walked away with his union entourage. Those reading this in a newspaper really should go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI and see for yourself what many of these OWS people are like. Chicago OWS led similar zombie chants.

Unlike the smelly, dreadlocked contingent, these zombie leftists appear to maintain personal hygiene standards, but mentally, they’ve gone over the edge. I sat through teacher staff meetings at which we had sensitivity consultants coach us about how to make everyone present “feel safe” enough to speak so we could all “come to consensus.” They trained us to use “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” and “thumbs sideways” gestures so the leader could “take the temperature” of the group non-verbally. Sometimes I was tempted to make other hand gestures, but restrained myself so my hot-house-flower colleagues wouldn’t faint. If the sensitivity consultants trained us to do the OWS repetitive-chant technique, I’d have left the profession much earlier.

Though they were organizing behind the scenes from the beginning, the public employee unions SEIU and AFSCME are in the open now. They’re joined by street people drawn to the free food provided by sympathetic businesses. Teenage party types come too, drawn by drug use and public sex. Others are paid by Soros-funded recruiters who advertise on Craig’s list. Many in the OWS contingent are anarchists. In what is becoming the icon of the OWS “movement,” one was photographed by the London Daily Mail defecating on a police car in Manhattan. Other pictures showed mountains of trash.

None of this was seen at Tea Party demonstrations. The contrast between left and right in America is quite stark, and which side wins in 2012 may well determine the survival of our republic.