This power has destroyed the mightiest empires the world has
ever seen. All crumble and dissolve the moment enough people simply withdraw
their consent. Not loudly. But quietly, covertly. The Roman Empire was destroyed
not by barbarians, but by draft evasion, tax evasion, and desertion. Alexander
and Napoleon’s armies were stopped only when their own soldiers refused
to continue, or simply went home. It wasn’t the Abolitionists who put
an end to slavery in America: it was the dogged and ingenious resistance of
millions of slaves, from foot-dragging and flight to endless acts of sabotage,
that made the entire economic system based on slavery untenable. It was millions
of acts of quiet refusal that rendered all the Soviet Union’s tanks and
missiles and secret police powerless.
The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic
system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who
have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main
purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction
of every one of us into debt peons. We cannot stop them through elections when
both parties are bought and paid for. One thing we can do is to quietly withdraw
our consent.
And so we have done. By refusing to pay the money they claim we owe them.
We may be doing so covertly, we may not yet dare to reveal our names and show
our faces, but do not doubt for a moment that these millions of acts of refusal
are, each and every one of them, acts of profound moral courage. All our lives
we’ve been told to pay our debts. That it doesn’t matter that the
game is rigged and that it was set up by liars and criminals. We are well aware
of the shame, the harassment, the legal threats, humiliation, the sheer physical
violence they will unleash on us. We are willing to defy these threats, because
in the end, we know there’s something more powerful than fear: and that
is the love we have for others. To be able to take care of our children, our
friends, our families, the people that matter most to us, to learn, to teach,
to foster, to give to our communities, is a value that no accountant can ever
measure, that no government loan administrator or hedge fund manager can ever
have the right to take away from us. Every dollar we take from a fraudulent
subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from the collection agency,
is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities,
to those we love and we respect.
We are an army of lovers who cannot be defeated.
We are laying the groundwork for another world.
Taken from "Tidal #3: Join the Resistance"
Available at: http://occupytheory.org/