The Occupy Revolution: Collateral Damage

I feel it is necessary to recount something that was spoken to me on Sunday. In of all places the food storage pantry of our church where we store all the canned goods for our "feed the homeless" program called Sharing Table. After my recent 6 week absence from nyc, a good friend passed me an arms full of canned green beans to shelve and looked me in the eyes; "I only have one thing to say about your newest activism Eddie... The more money that you all pull out of the banks in your 'Occupy movement', good people who work at those banks are losing their jobs: tellers and lower income earners who only make $20,000 to $25,000. That's who's being affected the most by your actions. You need to be aware of that." Her comment took me by surprise. Indeed we do need to be aware of this. And now we are. Something for us all to be aware of. And to ponder. I found myself disturbed. But only for a breif moment, as I recalled that BECU the WA based credit union hired over 100 new employees last week in order to meet the demand created by how many of us who transferred our money to them from Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Of course there is so much more to this story.... And together we shall cover it all in our continuing dialogues. But at the least let us remember that where we are presently in our various 'Occupy Revolution' tactics there are going to be some innocents who get affected by our actions. And that surely is not our goal. To each of them we offer our apologies and hope that in the long run this will be a peaceful and successful shift for the better good for us all.
Interestingly about an hour later someone else said to me in response to this comment "Then they too will recognize that they are part of the 99% when they get laid off while the owners and officers and directors at these banks keep their jobs and continue to be paid tens of millions of dollars a year. It's sad. But it's true. And they will soon join the cause once they see that even they are not immune to the rampant greed of Wall Street and Big Banks." Perhaps I thought this is the only way for all of the 99% to truly come together. When the only people left standing are the 1%, then we can begin the transformation to a more fair and equitable system for all 100% of us.