Occupy.

For six weeks now, the Occupy movement has been an easy one for me to ignore. I live in the Charleston, South Carolina area; we're a small, divisive city, not inclined toward overcoming trivialities for the sake of a larger good. "Idealism bordering on douchbaggery," I wrote it off as, and was able to dismiss it as being, exactly that. Don't misunderstand: I support what the Occupy movement is shooting for, I just have little to no faith in the power of the movement to create meaningful change in a system that's so deeply rooted in and founded upon phenomenal amounts of money. How does one combat the extremification of capitalism?

I don't know that we can. I'm pretty certain that they (the prototypical Occupiers) cannot. Still, it's nice to see that someone is at least trying, and I'm much more interested to see the warriors who have fought, bled, and died in defense of those ideals now joining in the protest against the bastardization of them. I've read some criticism that the Occupy movement has no leadership, no clear agenda, no platform: it's all just shouting. I think this is a narrow viewpoint.

Picture this: You and your significant other are in the kitchen preparing dinner together. Homemade macaroni and cheese is on the menu, and you whip out your block of Colby Jack and start shredding. Your partner asks what you're doing; the love of your life makes mac and cheese with Cheddar, always has, always will. You're reasonable, maybe you could compromise and use some of each. Your partner insists no, asks tells demands orders commands you to put the Colby Jack down and step away slowly. "Mac and cheese," the now-slobbering, red-eyed cannibal before you growls through gritted teeth, "is made with cheddar." Now, cooking dinner together has become a battle. You confront your mate about why they're so unreasonable; they charge you with being spineless and not standing up for yourself. You counter that standing up for oneself need not be done with force, nor taken as an act of treason. Minutes later, one of you is a Marxist and the other a McCarthyist and the argument is one from which your relationship simply cannot be saved, all over a child's pasta dish that could just as well have been made from powder in a box.

This is what the Occupy movement has become: the American people (and, indeed, people from around the world) have become so utterly disillusioned with the endless litany of slights committed against us by our leaders (don't dare blaspheme the word representatives in this context) and the corporate gods that support them that we no longer know which specific issues to scream about. Furthermore, the longer the protests go on, the more issues they give us to scream about. It started out as a generalized hue and cry over corporate greed, but that spilled over into outrage over political corruption; protestation led to police controls and laid bare the monster of rampant police brutality and the simple fact that, in the eyes of so many police organizations, the United States is a police state. Since that's what our troops have (ostensibly) been doing overseas - putting down police states and dictatorships, replacing them with democracies - it does my heart good to see them now acting on their own on our home soil to attempt the same thing here.

Maybe I do know what the Occupy movement's agenda is. Justice Potter Stewart sagely coined the phrase, "I know it when I see it," back in 1964. Criticized for its lack of "concreteness," it refers to a simple thing: the word common. Common sense, common decency, common ideals. This is what people from the vast majority of the world's population, across a wide spectrum of religious and social backgrounds, are protesting in favor of. Stop robbing the people who support you. Start representing the people who vote for you. Stop pistol-whipping people who assemble peacably and save your violent outbursts for criminals who have done something wrong. What's so hard about that? Why must we have laws to mandate every transaction, every interaction, every word spoken or action taken? Just be decent to each other. Be decent to us. We aren't resources to be capitalized upon and managed and bilked for everything we're worth and whipped into line when we think a little bit for ourselves; we're your neighbors, your friends, your brothers and sisters.

Why is that so hard?