I’m not just any old dumb-ass. I’m a dumb-ass with a lot of hats, cats and a few chickens. But I’m also a dumb-ass who’s lived long enough to recognize tripwires and the sound of impending silence tromping around in the nether regions.
I’m a dumb-ass with a pair of ears I can hear with and eyes I can see with.
What I see and hear are the forces of ‘the other side’ are dragging out the heavy artillery and the Magnificent Seven. The propagandist litany of dirty sexual organs, dirty clothes, dirty underwear and dirty Communism is already coming through the loudspeakers of surround-sound.
You’re being demonized, but they’re also planting pamphlets they claim are circulating among you about what circumstances it’s okay to kill cops. Claiming your promiscuity’s worse than that of a politician or vice cop. Claiming you’re getting your funding from any organization they think anyone hates.
These tactics have always worked for them in the past. They’re not too different from those used by the USSR against Polish Solidarity to keep it down almost a decade. They’re not, for that matter, too different from those used once in Germany to acclimatize the population to some reason behind a segment of the population vanishing.
Meanwhile it’s going to get cold nights and those who have somewhere warm to go are going to find all manner of important reasons to go there.
Generally it makes better PR to go voluntarily than to be driven out by having been discredited so badly as to seem a justifiable target for physical abuse. And it’s better to go voluntarily than just to fade from something that can be labelled ‘lack of support’, or ‘lack of interest’.
I’ve never quite been dumb-ass enough to think this OWS business is likely to bring about any positive change, but I have been dumb-ass enough to hope it doesn’t get steamrollered. Enough to allow a microscopic hope that what’s being done could get the attention of some piece of the power structure enough to get them thinking.
But now the clock is running. There’s more than a hint that both political parties have realized allowing all these folks to quietly sink back into the population when a national election’s looming on the horizon might be worse then having them out where they can be discredited and infiltrated by provocateurs, inflamed and accused.
I’m a dumb-ass who thinks the smart ones are filling up the address books with email addresses and phone numbers, packing their dirty sex, dirty underwear, and dirty Communism as carry-on luggage for a trip below the horizon, off the radar.
But I’m not dumb-ass enough to think anyone’s going to do it.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 