Occupy Together

The Occupy Movement took a quantum step this last weekend. You won’t hear about it in the news, because it was too big, too important, and too positive to be “newsworthy.”

There are now “Occupy’s” in so many places: not just cities, but hamlets, parks, places, ideas. And even though the 20-somethings can take action at the tapping of a few thumbs - like the action to move money out of the offending banks - an idea that was spoken at a GA meeting a few weeks ago with no mike to amplify it, but it was tweeted world-wide in seconds, and this weekend they reported that one billion dollars has moved out of the banks in those few weeks.

OT was a gathering of Occupies from all over the North East. We were brainstorming how to network across Occupies, regionally, nationally, globally, so that not only could a good idea for an action (like the bank idea) spread at the speed of light, but the interaction could be two-way, so the kernel of an idea in Philly could be improved upon in Seattle, and honed in Kiev, and refined by individuals and groups until it was ready to be tweeted as an action world-wide.

Pre-Occupied

People keep asking me what the Occupy people want, what they expect to change, how do they expect to do it, why they don’t have any leaders or agenda?

Of course none of these people have ever been to a GA (General Assembly) meeting, or gone to any of the thousands of online documents and chats about content. What they are really asking is: Why hasn’t the Occupy movement done anything that is “newsworthy” enough to be reported in the commercial “news.”

I could quote Einstein to them, “No problem has ever been solved by the kind of thinking that caused it.” It is apropos.

Those of us whose political habits are pre-Occupy are so preoccupied with the structures of power and information that got us into this mess, we not only don’t question the process, we have a hard time noticing when change is occurring.

It’s the same with my clients. By the time most of them come to me, their relationship is in the same kind of disarray our society is, these days. They too are about to lose their homes, their dreams are already turning into nightmares. 

Still they come to me hoping I will change some “thing” within the existing structure - usually they hope it will either be how their spouse is, or who is their spouse.

Instead I do what the Occupiers are doing, I set up camp beside their “business as usual” processes, and advocate for inclusion, for all the parts of themselves and of their spouse that have been marginalized, downsized, foreclosed, and disenfranchised.

At the macro level that the Occupy movement confronts, I don’t know what the solution is. On the micro level of the family, the solution is just as invisible to the couples I work with as it is to the 99% who keep asking when the Occupy Movement is going to fix everything.

It’s hard to see the answer, when you’re right inside the problem – so close you’re actually part of it. That’s why a marriage mediator is do valuable. I stand just outside their marriages, so I can see the way out. “Follow me.”

When the Police Roll In

First, the sadness. It is as if the rubber bullets buffeted my heart. The LA police’s tank rolled over my happiness.

Okay, what part of me is like the greed that ordered that holocaust; is like the glee that ripped flimsy tents and spewed free food in the mud? When has destruction seemed the only and right course inside of me? When have I seen Truth and vulnerability and compassion, and responded with hatred and anger and violence?

When I am in the throes of terror (wrongly) that the only way I can get the thing I really need is by fighting for it. When my thoughts fall down a bottomless well of despair into my own childhood night terrors. When it seems I’m living a life-and-death primal jungle struggle that can only end with one winner standing.

No matter how much stuff I have piled up in my life, it seems there is a part of myself that is still in that jungle, fighting for his life against some unknown enemy.

It is the “unknown” quality of that enemy which is so insidious.

It allows us to project it on anyone or anything. It strips away the thin veneer of society and tears the fabric of our civilized life, and pulls us all the way back to the primal ooze.

How do we speak our desire for fairness, without scaring the warriors back into fight or flight?