My Speech for Occupy Thunder Bay

Politics for Joe
November 7, 2011
By: Hubert O’Hearn
For: Lake Superior News


A Speech for Occupy Thunder Bay

(I’ve received a very kind invitation through Facebook to say a few words at the Occupy Thunder Bay event scheduled for 3-6PM Sunday, November 20th at Thunder Bay City Hall. While I’m open to sudden inspiration carrying me away from the script, this is what I’m planning on saying...)

I hope you’ll forgive me if I admit to being a bit nervous about this. It’s been several years since I’ve spoken from a stage of any kind, and more years than that since I’ve done a political speech for my own voice. When I’ve written speeches they’ve mostly been for candidates who go on to lose the election. So now that I’ve admitted to being a nervous hack of dubious merit, thank you for allowing me to share my evident lack of expertise.

First, I want you to give yourselves a big hug. I mean it. Give the person next to you a hug, unless they have a drippy cold; then give the person next to you a Kleenex. I’ll wait.

There now. Did you know that according to whomever got a big grant to study this sidebar of psychology that the average person needs eight hugs a day for their emotional well-being? We do. We crave contact. We need contact. It’s written into us by whatever Creator, genetic mutation or happy old man who lives on a cloud invented human beings. So you’ve already accomplished something today. You’ve met 12.5% of someone’s daily needs. Congratulations.

And that is really what I want to talk to you about; what I want to talk with you about - hugs and needs. When I was invited to say a few words today about whatever issue I chose - and I can’t overly stress the honour and pride I felt at that moment - that clearly gave me a pretty broad range of topics. I started first by making a mental list of all the things, all the issues, all the government policies and private interests I had focused on in my political writing and book reviewing. It was a mental list because actually writing it down would have felt much too much like work. Organization is for sissies.

Here though is the list as I recall it:

The double or even triple standards of health care in Canada with our glorious publicly funded system which works great if you live in a city with the specialists and testing you need.

The anti-environmental interests that batter and bruise our planet because who gives a damn about tomorrow when I can drive two blocks today?

The selling of our universities as publicly funded research divisions of multi-national corporations while the Humanities - those subjects that teach people to think not what to think - dwindle and crumble because there’s no money in philosophy baby.

That we go to war for oil. That we go to war for money. That we go to war period. We used to fight for democracy. Now we fight in spite of it.

That we have allowed to spawn and breed a plutocracy so wealthy that if one of the multi-billionaires dropped a thousand dollar bill on the ground he would make more than that in the seconds it would take for him to bend over and pick it up.

That a corporate Satan like Goldman-Sachs is allowed to even exist after causing the financial crises in the U.S. and Europe by selling financial snake oil.

There would have been even more to the list but I had to stop there because thinking about these things was making me angry and angrier and angrier and I was about ready to start turning into Hulk Hogan, ripping my shirt open, popping my muscles, shaking my arms, pointing a finger and saying, ‘YOU! Don’t. Do. That.’

And I was so angry that I was ready to invigorate, agitate, instigate and turn us all into reprobates because something, someone, some place was going to go down brother! Watch us take these chains wrapped around our slave necks, rip them off and put them on our fists.

And I was so angry then because I realized...

...that’s just what they want. They want us so pissed off they can lock us up and throw away the key. Because they rule with fear, they want us angry so we can feed the fear.

It’s like that silly old Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk and the Enterprise are fighting the Klingons in the hallways and corridors and there’s this weird little light monster - man they had a lousy special effects budget - but the little light monster kept getting stronger and stronger as the humans and Klingons got madder and madder. Until finally Captain Kirk...or maybe it was Spock. Yeah, this sounds more like a Vulcan thing. Anyway, they notice this and that the only way to beat this monster was to put down the swords and bat’leths (I am a geek in case you hadn’t noticed) and give that mangy old Klingon who smelled like five weeks of bad B.O. and unchanged underwear and give him a HUG!

So there’s our slogan! ‘Defeat Wall Street! Hug a Klingon Today!’ 

Resemblance to Occupy antagonist
Kevin O'Leary is purely coincidental...
eerie, but coincidental

And I’m only half-kidding. Brothers, sisters and a bunch of people I haven’t met, although Dad did get around...I love this Movement. Occupy is the best thing that has happened in world history in my lifetime. Think about it. Think about it. We went to the moon in 1969 and that was great but what did we get? Couple of baskets of rocks and a bunch of bad science fiction. We developed computers so people can be buried in so much information they’ll never have time to process it and do anything with it. We developed cell phones so that the bank can get a hold of you any time, anywhere to tell you they’re foreclosing on your house.

No, Occupy is the best thing that has happened because it offers the other thing that people need every day besides hugs. It offers hope. We need hope. Hope is our basic need. Hope trumps air and water. Without hope, that essential dumb little belief that today might be just a teensy bit better than yesterday, or if today blows chunks, there’s always tomorrow - without that, why breathe? Seriously. Why the hell would you be bothered to inhale?

We have problems. We have eight times eight jillion problems. Yet the beautiful thing is that we have solutions to every one of them. Every one. Read Chris Turner’s book The Leap. There’s a solution on every page. Read anything Bill Mckibben has written about the environment or Chris Hedges has written about government, war or finance. Solutions on every page.

The only way it happens though is - Warning! Tree-hugging, granola eating, bunny-loving hippe alert! - the only way it happens is with Love.

Anger destroys. Love creates. Anger is despair. Love is hope. Anger shuts the door. Love opens a window. People will listen to Love. And if you know your facts, know your story, believe in your hearts that we will have a better, more beautiful world; then you can reach past the mockery, the fear, the anger, the greed, the crass stupidity that will drop a tree across your path every day … if you keep speaking calmly and with Love …

… then it really will be like what The Beatles sang in Revolution. ‘Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right?’

God love you. I love you. And YOU love you.

If you smell what Occupy is cooking.

Be seeing you.