Thursday, March 19, 2015

PTSD

It's occupy again. I came across some message of social media, got updated on twitter and hooked again in tuning into tweets and feeds from a different 'corner' of our planet. This time, not the US went into the spotlight, but Europe. In Frankfurt the European Central Bank opened its new head quarters which united many Europeans to air their dissent about the wave of austerity sweeping over Europe.

I used to live in Frankfurt, and saw many familiar views in the images and streams I came across. I even used to work for the ECB, walking over red carpet into the opera house in the summer of 1998 when its birth was celebrated. I don't expect my signature to have remained in the guest book, but you'll never know.

When Occupy Wallstreet swept like a virus around the globe, it happened in Melbourne as well as in Frankfurt, and many hundred of other cities. My friends back in Frankfurt weren't too impressed by what happened then, and like, everywhere else, the occupy movement fizzled away.

Or just went into some sort of metamorphosis. Some people continued to provide community support in various ways, continued in activism for other causes, joined cooperatives, started growing food and, of course, some spend endless time licking their wound to keep them fresh.

The major cause of misery, an economic system designed to feed the rich and starve the poor, increased its potency to cause havoc among communities and mother nature. International institutions like the ECB and the ESM (European Stability Mechanism), not to mention IMF, World Bank disempower local governments to become pawns of a monetary aristocracy.

The human family, with 7 billions or even more members, deserves a better organisation of society than one which allows anyone to starve despite the abundance the planet has to offer. All forms of government have been invented by humans. We can invent something which serves everyone. Anything less doesn't make any sense.