Occupy The Voting Booth

Occupy The Voting Booth

I have a nagging fear building within me that the youngest and brightest among us, those caught up in the Occupy movement will, in their zest for the big picture, forget that all politics is local. These activists need to hone in on those politicians who got our country into the mess we're in. As Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, stressed recently : congress needs term limits, but until that happens, voters must vote out the old bulls, those whose primary objective is to get reelected. I would add, voters must also throw out those newly elected who have obstructed rather than govern as required when they took the pledge to uphold The Constitution of the United States Of America.

History will probably record The Occupy Movement as a successful exercise of expressing disgust in the inequities between the haves and the have nots which were brought about by governmental actions. I only hope history will also record the movement spun off real change in how legislators adjusted to a new era of governance. Not all revolutions need to be bloody.

In the long history of Man upheaval happened often. Many were very bloody as each side shouldered their weapon of choice : a broad axe, a spear, a lance, a pitch fork, but mostly a gun. Gandhi, nor King, nor Jesus chose any of these weapons and their results seem much more lasting than any violent one's, even so, all three lost their lives trying to effect change.

Pottstown also needs to shoulder its weapon of choice and I contend that the weapon be a long handled broom accompanied with a sturdy dust pan and a hefty trash bag. Only an army of sweepers with their boots on the ground can make this sow's ear into a silk purse. 

The real test of the soul of a town is not in it's downtown main street or it's prime residential neighborhoods but it is found in how the condition of it's worst allies. If they are relatively clean and fairly well kept you can bet the main, highly visible areas of the town will also be clean. Once upon a time, Pottstown was that way, not from an army of cleaners, but from each and every household being prideful masters of their own domain. Maybe they didn't own the property they lived at but they took pride in the property they lived in. Pride is always an exercise in self worth and fulfillment, traits lost in our race to the bottom world we find ourselves in today.

It will be a tough campaign in the war to take Pottstown back from the entrenched profiteers who treat our town as a throwaway place. It will be extra tough cleaning up after them when they are cleaned out of our town, but it will be worth it. Shoulder your brooms, fall in, the spring offensive is creating a battle plan, 

Ronald C. Downie