Manufacturing Crisis

Walking outside with the dogs and cats this very windy afternoon, found myself mentally free-associating (that is, meandering down various paths, sort of like web surfing, if that’s a term, anymore), starting with Occupy Wall Street, moving from there (somehow) to language, to language of the workplace, language specifically of my workplace, language differences between, say, Cape Cod and San Antonio, which led me somehow to thinking about my religious sister’s matter-of-fact proclamation one day a few weeks ago that there would be no 2012 elections because President Obama (well, she didn’t say “president;” she never refers to him as the president) would manufacture a crisis, declare martial law and cancel the election.

And somehow that led me back to Occupy Wall Street. It occurred to me that someone will probably start preaching that President Obama and his socialist minions orchestrated OWS as just the kind of crisis that could compel him to declare martial law. It also occurred to me that, if the idea had sprung into my head, likely it had already sprung into the heads of others. So when I got back inside, I googled it--and sure enough, no less an “authority” than Glenn Beck had floated the idea a couple weeks ago and people have been running with it.

Of course, this makes perfectly good sense. The same President Obama whose lack of leadership experience (he was a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) makes him an utter failure as a president, in their eyes, nevertheless could mobilize a national, or rather, international “grass roots movement” (well, he WAS a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) that could bring down a 223-year republic of 300 million people, probably half of whom hate him.

It doesn’t strike me as a particularly plausible scenario.

That said, I do fear that OWS will end badly. Before it’s over, someone is going to be dead--probably several someones. Among the thousands of protesters, and the thousands (?) of people who hate them, there are more than a few potential Jared Loughners--people with guns and axes to grind. Depending upon who is the first to die, there will be retaliation--if a Wall Street bank gets shot up, what happened out in Oakland is going to look like a picnic. If a group of protesters gets shot up, there will be a different kind of retaliatory violence.

Yes, Kent State COULD happen again, and personally I think that more likely than not.

I’m neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, but it seems to me that the mix of despairing, angry groups of people on one side, and stressed-out, hugely outnumbered police on the other, plus external stresses like impending bad weather, is a potentially deadly one.

One unstable person, on either side, with a gun could transform these largely peaceful demonstrations into riots.

Could imposition of martial law then become a possibility? Disturbing thought, although I think it would be hard to justify imposing it nationwide, rather than selectively--specifically in those cities where the demonstrations have become riots.

That’ll teach me to walk around with dogs and cats.