For those people who believe that the system is fixed and the people cannot be organized to change the system no matter how corrupt it has become, its instructional to point out that the 99 percent “Occupy Wall Street” movement was not controlled by corporate leaders or by Wall Street money. And they got their message out despite the mass media. Their main weakness was that they did not have a systemic economic “solution” to the source of their frustrations and fears. They lacked the knowledge and leadership to advocate solutions to continued concentrated ownership of income-producing productive capital.
The last major system change was orchestrated by a fraction of the African American community, a significantly smaller body of America than the labor movement or the 99 percent who have been enslaved by the current system.
Here are two quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose words address the mindset of your critic and the many who think like him:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. […] Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” [Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963]
“When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. [Memphis Speech, 1968]
King and those at the front lines of changing the system of institutionalized racism also were frustrated by the lack of support from most leaders in African American churches.
Also useful to understanding change is from Arthur C. Clarke, who characterized the four successive stages of response to any new and revolutionary innovation as follows:
1. It’s crazy!
2. It may be possible — so what?
3. I said it was a good idea all along.
4. I thought of it first.
The Aharonov-Bohm effect, predicted in 1959, required nearly 30 years after its 1960 demonstration by Chambers until it was begrudgingly accepted. Mayer, who discovered the modern thermodynamic notion of conservation of energy related to work, was hounded and chastised so severely that he suffered a breakdown. Years later, he was lionized for the same effort. Wegener, a German meteorologist, was made a laughing stock and his name became a pseudonym for “utter fool,” because he advanced the concept of continental drift in 1912. In the 1960s the evidence for continental drift became overwhelming, and today it is widely taught and part of the standard science curriculum. Gauss, the great mathematician, worked out nonlinear geometry but kept it firmly hidden for 30 years, because he knew that if he published it, his peers would destroy him. In the 1930s, Goddard was ridiculed and called “moon-mad Goddard” because he predicted his rocketry would carry men to the moon. Years later when the Nazi fired V-1 and V-2 rockets against London, those rockets used the gyroscopic stabilization and many other features discovered and pioneered by Goddard. And as everyone knows, rocketry did indeed carry men to the moon. Science has a long and unsavory history of severely punishing innovation and new thinking. In the modern world such scientific suppression of innovation is uncalled-for, but it is still very much the rule rather than the exception.”
(Arthur C. Clarke, in “Space Drive: A Fantasy That Could Become Reality,” Nov./Dec. 1994, p. 38.)
