Occupy Wall Street. Occupy San Jose. A Night with the Resistance.

On October 2, 2011 a group was seen marching down the streets of San Jose, young men with masks holding out signs against the corporate factions of our economy, middle aged men and women dissatisfied with the condition of the country. The streets were clear, the sounds of cars honking as they passed the group by, signs that said “we are the 99%” held high over their heads, passing the shops and corporate banks down towards Plaza Park.

Adbusters, the radical magazine that had announced the date for the movement in their last issue, had in effect created something that was unprecedented, something unforeseen by the government and corporate industries that had been bailed out by its representatives. Goldman Sachs, General Motors, and the span of corporate elites saw a mob of different factions gather on the steps of Wall Street. The movement quickly moved from city to city, not just across the United States, but across the world. The group establishing themselves with tents around City Hall in San Jose, they have been there now over two weeks, establishing a form of self-sustained commune, staying over night.

It is close to midnight, the sounds of a loud city dim down, and the crowds gather around the center of the camp. New members have joined, some because of home responsibities leave the camp at night and return during the day after work to stay close kindling the flame of the resistance.

Outside a crowd of zombies passes by from a public art project called Zombie Walk. They are people dressed up as the dead walking around an ultra lounge, high end clubs that contrast the disparity of the poor, the homeless that scatter about the town. It is almost poetic how mindless creatures have become the metaphor of a sheltered ignorant nation, one where one is told who one is, from corporations, to government that sell to its people the meaning of life. Looking like cracked out addicts they stroll the city. At the occupation, the cars honk in support at the occupants. The Occupy San Jose agenda is clear -- to declare the grievances of a nation ill from bad economic policy, that benefits the few and subjects the majority to its corporate rule.

A large number of Americans want to know what will happen next, what is the solution. But as history has had it, the rise of the laissez-faire private nation that we are now encountering sprung from the very factions that accused the poor of leftist agendas. In America there is a veneer of civility, that makes us believe in justice and human rights, something that the southern cone of Latin America were stripped of by dictatorships that forcibly sought to impose free market economies.

America has a luxury that many did not have, that on the same day of San Jose’s occupation were exterminated, persecuted, and disappeared, accused of leftist ideologies, all to promote and subject its people to a globalized economy that marginalized its people for profit.

In this day and age, there can be no more lies, one can have an objection to the people that crowd around the streets, the ones that claim their territory over Wall Street, but the grievances that they have are very much real, and to that the objection should be greater.