I am going to deliver a message. In this nonviolent message, I will attempt to give a voice to the dissent of the many.

If my message resonates with you, I only ask that you make your voice known. We are a troubled country. We are very aware of the outrage that lies within our very core. Suppressed and dormant this outrage wreaks havoc on the mind and the very foundation of day to day interactions. It is natural to doubt the outrage. As such a privileged country with a government that is in theory, the worlds foremost just and democratic system, what more could we want? It is easy to forget your outrage and assume that the stresses and struggles of everyday life are natural. Its easy to assume that our country is doing the very best it can for its people, and that those who dissent are asking for too much. It is easy to assume that our patience and faith with government has not been betrayed. It is easy to believe that your outrage is unimportant, and that it never had any actual claim to reality. Yet even after we cease to believe in our outrage, we can still feel its presence. It makes us want to shout, to stand up, and announce to the world that something is very wrong. The most dangerous threat to our freedom has been the way this outrage has been directed and manipulated. The major media networks that are owned and controlled by private corporations omit important stories, while headlining others in order to direct that outrage to where it will do them the least harm. This system of privately owned media censorship and sensationalism is in blatant disregard of the first amendment; and whats worse is it has pitted Americans against each other. If you believe that Democrat or Republican leadership is the only factor responsible for all of the trouble in government, then you begin to perceive your outrage only as a call to act against the opposition. Students and working class citizens in Bahrain, Egypt, and Libya created a call to action through social networking. They did this because the media in their countries were controlled by dictatorial elites who would use media outlets only as a tool to shape public opinion. We can see the same thing happening here. The media has produced a culture war by showing us only the most extreme viewpoints and merging bias with analysis. We assume that partisan divides in this country are at an all time high, when in reality the majority of the population share the same values. But why would anyone want to make us frightened of each other? Why shouldnt I assume that humans at their very core are self serving? We are taught to fear one another because fear prevents us from listening with an open mind. The fear keeps us convinced that we are

a fragmented people with a minority view, but were we to listen to one anothers views with an open mind we would realize that together our values make up the majority; if this were to happen, we would start to question why our majority opinion has no influence. The simple yet powerful idea that we are not so different from one another would change this society drastically. However in our current structure, people assume that their fellow man is inherently self serving. If you believe this, then the next logical step is to adopt the same self serving behavior in order to ensure your own survival. It is in this way that greed becomes the justification for greed. This mentality of avarice which has become prevalent ensures us that there is no other way but struggle. Many people have felt the foreboding mechanization that industrial society brings. Today we can see it clearly in the modern standards of the workplace. Workers in all levels of society have become component parts of a larger entity to which they are expendable. Blue collar or white collar all of these workers are being forced into a spiral of debt. All the while they work jobs that have been transformed into monotonous, bureaucratic environments where emotional compromise is routine. This is a system where the slave has been convinced that the color of his collar is all that matters. We must stop and take a look at the world of white lies and half truths that we call a cultural foundation. We need to start figuring out why this outrage exists in the first place, and how we can each decide to act on it. Another powerful psychological obstacle we need to be aware of is the acceptance of the status quo. A society instilled with the need to accept the status quo will progress only by developing newer and more efficient systems through which they can continue to fool themselves. There doesn't need to be a conspiratorial group of elites that calculate how to control society. After the values of acceptance to the status quo are in place within a culture, the task of socializing future generations is no longer necessary. This explains why when solid facts about immoral behaviors behind powerful government and financial actors are brought up, the conversation often ends with the statement, "that is just the way things are." What needs to be realized is that while "the way things are" right now are immediate and familiar, they are not the way things need to be. From what media coverage I could find on this movement, I found a lot of criticism regarding the overall request for social change. It has been said that this movement has not been clear or precise enough in its government requests. The cry for freedom is apparently too vague. So I would like to try and make the request for freedom clear, to explain what we mean by free. If

you agree with what I am going to say I request only that you make the message known. We request a moral structure for this nation, which takes more into account than religious dogma, profit margins and efficiency. We request accountability from the people that control the resources we produce and consume. We request that political representation cater to us again instead of big business lobbying and poll statistics. We request a media with less central control, one that will analyze opposing viewpoints in order to provide rational and impartial information. We request that the value of the human in the workplace be more than a financial figure. We request that our opinions and values will matter to political decision-making that affects the whole country. We request that our organized dissent mean more than a domestic threat to national security. We need a society that offers opportunity for both moral and material growth. And we need a fundamental change in our national conception of humanity. This is not a movement to incite violence. This is a call to people everywhere to begin inciting massive acts of peace. It is only when we are able to question the norms of our culture that we can begin to shatter the illusions of our inevitable misery. It is only after we are again able to use our gift of human empathy that we can begin to change things for the better.