A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper
The 92-year-old folk singer icon Pete Seeger traveled down the Hudson River Valley with his folk-singing friend Arlo Guthrie this October 21 to lend support to the ongoing ‘Occupy Movement’ for the 99 per cent that got its start, more than a month ago, at ground zero in New York City.
Folk legend Peter Seeger (middle) joins protesters at Occupy movement gathering in New York City this October 21.
On a chilly Friday evening, Seeger, long known for his support for social justice and peace (so much so that he was blacklisted by the right-wing equivalents of Sarah Palin in the 1950s), and his busy Arlo sang songs with hundreds of others around Columbus Circle in New York City in support of countless hundreds of thousands of others in the U.S., Canada and other nations around the world who are getting sick and tired of watching their opportunity for a good life melt down while a few greedy people gamble with stock paper and hedge funds at their expense.
These people on the stock floors on Wall Street and Bay Street behave like hogs in a pit who, as filthy as they are in a more figurative sort of way, look like they’ve never had any honest dirt on their hands in the sense that they’ve ever produced a toaster or anything else of any real value. They don’t deal in a real economy that is about working at a job producing things that people need. They trade in bogus bonds and other paper garbage that have contributed to the most catastrophic economic downturn on this continent since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
All that this swine has done is shove on the rest of us the worst face of capitalism and left ticker tape equivalent of toilet paper on the stockroom floors with their feces on it.
So there was good old Peter Seeger and his friend Arlo Guthrie out there with some of the Occupy movement people camping still braving the colder air descending on their rallies. They led the gathering in a few choruses of ‘We Shall Overcome’. For the sake of a middle class on this continent that is being dismembered by the hogs on Wall and Bay Streets, let’s damn well hope we do overcome.
(Share your views below. Please try to stay at least as civil as the author of this post was in your comments. On this particular topic, I know it’s hard.)
Niagara At Large 
“so much so that he was blacklisted by the right-wing equivalents of Sarah Palin in the 1950s”….C’mon Doug or like what’s happening on Canadian Universities to conservatives.
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Sorry John. Maybe I’m missing the point here and that is possible on a busy Sunday but I con’t know where conservatives are being blacklisted or pushed down on Canadian university campuses these days. My daughter has been going to college for two years and is now attending a Canadian university and the message I get from her and her friends is that university campuses in this country are hardly the liberal incubators that they were in the 1960s. They feel they are pretty conservative and most of them like it that way. They just want to get their degree in business or engineering or education and land a job. Doug Draper
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As it did in the 1960s, a visible philosophical divide continues to exist in most institutions between students/faculty (learning) and administration (profit); therefore, it is difficult to speak of a university in a singular sense. While this divide has always been true of the privatized higher education system in the United States, a survey of current and recent university students/faculty would surely reveal concerns regarding this increasingly apparent trend in Canada as well. This is no more evident than the controversies surrounding the engagements of ultra-conservative speakers at Canadian universities, in which profit-driven administrators sell $500 tickets for Ann Coulter only to cancel in the face of (inevitable) student opposition. This is not censorship, this is democracy in its most organic and effective form.
The continued demonstration of resistance by today’s student population, a group significant enough to disrupt these highly-profitable events, is also evidence that universities are not attended exclusively by young people seeking only a degree and a job. This statement is no more true than the blanket statements of the 1960s that lauded students as draft dodgers and anarchists. As much as the institutions may view students as simple tuition-paying entities, the university student is and will continue to be an important actor in our country’s pursuit of social change.
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Would have liked to see an Occupy Niagara camp here, but I sense there is too much backwardness and skepticism to allow that to happen.
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As it did in the 1960s, a visible philosophical divide continues to exist in most institutions between students/faculty (learning) and administration (profit); therefore, it is difficult to speak of a university in a singular sense. While this divide has always been true of the privatized higher education system in the United States, a survey of current and recent university students/faculty would surely reveal concerns regarding this increasingly apparent trend in Canada as well. This is no more evident than the controversies surrounding the engagements of ultra-conservative speakers at Canadian universities, in which profit-driven administrators sell $500 tickets for Ann Coulter only to cancel in the face of (inevitable) student opposition. This is not censorship, this is democracy in its most organic and effective form.
The continued demonstration of resistance by today’s student population, a group significant enough to disrupt these highly-profitable events, is also evidence that universities are not attended exclusively by young people seeking only a degree and a job. This statement is no more true than the blanket statements of the 1960s that lauded students as draft dodgers and anarchists. As much as the institutions may view students as simple tuition-paying entities, the university student is and will continue to be an important actor in our country’s pursuit of social change.
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Angela if they form a group to “Occupy Niagara” I would be pleased to help out. I will supply the barrels.
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