Now her Twitter aggregator of 120 news sources started filling with reports about Occupy Wall Street. Littlecrow started spending half the night on Google Plus, chatting with hundreds of friends and foes, probing the Occupy rebels about what they believed.
Two weeks ago, she posted on Reddit an open letter from “a former tea partier” who was now ready to join the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“I don’t agree with everything your movement does, but I sympathize with your cause and agree on our common enemy,” she wrote. She warned Occupy that it would be co-opted by unions and Democrats, just as the tea party was “hijacked” by religious groups and Republicans. She warned that news coverage would “focus on the movement’s most repulsive elements.”
She egged the Occupiers on, wishing them success against an oligarchy of big institutions that manipulate government against the interests of the people.
The letter went viral, eliciting hundreds of comments on political sites. Were the two movements finding a common language? On her farm far from Wall Street, Littlecrow was astounded by the reaction.
“It just ballooned,” she said.
Littlecrow doesn’t expect that the tea party or Occupy movements will result in basic change. Politicians will always answer to those who fund their campaigns, she said. But she sees value in pushing ahead.
“If someone’s an alcoholic,” she said, “the chances you’re going to stop that are really pretty low. But if you don’t at least acknowledge your problem and get angry about it, there’s nothing you can do. We can disagree about the finish line, but if we don’t speak out, we don’t even get near the finish to see what it could look like.”
The Occupier
Tobacco Thom is one of Occupy D.C.’s best-known residents. He’s the tall guy with the scraggly beard — a description that distinguishes him from not many men among the 94 tents at McPherson Square. But he’s instantly recognizable because he’s the guy with the coffee can full of cigarettes, free for the asking.
Tobacco Thom is Thom Reges, 26, who expects to remain on the square through the cold months. “I’m from Michigan,” he said. “Your winter doesn’t scare me.”
Reges is here because there are no jobs back home; because even after he moved to Virginia and got certified as a sign language interpreter, he could not find work; and because the rules of the road he learned growing up seem to no longer apply.
Reges, raised — as he said is true of nearly everyone at Occupy D.C. — as a liberal Democrat, always assumed he would work in the auto parts industry, but then carmakers cut way back and there were no jobs.
So he went to college, but ran out of money. So he trained as an interpreter, and that well ran dry, too.
Which is how he found himself in the park, talking with a tea party member.
They agreed on the problem: a power structure that lets elected officials pay lip service to the voters and then do the bidding of the companies and unions that pay their way.
They agreed on what got us here: Wall Street firms that made irresponsible bets that brought down the housing market, employers that exported jobs by the millions, ever-widening income inequality across the nation.
They found common ground about tactics: Whether through tea party rallies or Occupy encampments, it’s imperative to become an irritant, to grab the attention of fellow Americans who might otherwise watch a TV dance contest.
But there would be no “Kumbaya” moment. Their differences over solutions were too great. They both found President Obama to be a huge disappointment, but the tea party man wanted a president who would liberate business, reduce spending and cut taxes, and Reges craved a leader who would make government an activist in creating jobs, building infrastructure and wielding tax authority to reduce inequalities. “We voted for Obama for change, hope, creating new jobs, and what we see is concessions to the right again and again,” Reges said.
Still, he strolls the park every day looking for more tea party types to engage.
“We would love to be an example of what Congress should be doing — negotiate and find a middle ground,” he said. “Staying at home and grumbling wasn’t getting us anywhere. We tried voting and that didn’t work. Coming here and being an eyesore to let the people know there are disenfranchised Americans here makes us feel like we’re doing something.”
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