Steam

The Occupy folks are taking some real hits from all sides. It's said they're little more than a bunch of punk anarchists and wanna be hippies, incoherent, lacking in focus and largely absent clearly stated goals. They couldn't organize a baby shower much less an effective national movement for change we're told. Pastors and senators alike condemn the protests, sniffing that they are nothing but a group of undisciplined, self-centered losers, better off with a job at McDonalds than a place of leadership dealing with our nation's woes.

Who knows? Maybe the critics are right, maybe they'll soon fade away and leave the real work to us adults. But what if the scoffers have got it all wrong, what if these Occupiers are harbingers of a coming eruption, not the eruption itself? Maybe the Occupiers, and yes the Tea Party, are just plumes of steam, much the way a volcano begins emitting steam and gasses, sometimes years before it erupts?

I began experiencing a feeling of anticipation, almost dread,  the other day as I visited the blog We Are The 99 Percent. View it here . I saw the faces of nearly a thousand people posed next to handwritten explanations of the troubles they're dealing with, and the sense of desperation and fear they're facing almost leaped off the page. And there's millions more like that out here in America. Virtually every social eruption in modern times began with enormous financial hardship, huge gaps in income between the rich and well off and those struggling to feed their families, and a ruling elite scoffing at the suffering around them.

So, is it the eruption we're witnessing or are the Occupiers and Tea Partiers merely signs of an eruption still to come? How we answer that question will have a lot to do with America's future. God Bless us all.