Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on October 19, 2011.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been much in the news, and much on my mind. A life-time mistrust of a system where some can drive Mercedes while others struggle to pay the rent or put food on the table, where the children of some people get a new car when they turn 16 while the children of other people have to get a job to help with family expenses when they turn 16, where people born in North America fight obesity while most of the world goes hungry makes me naturally sympathetic to the cause, as unfocused as it appears to be.

I believe there is a reckoning coming… in the end, justice will have its day.

While the Occupy Wall Street protesters are an unorganized bunch, if they could organize enough to have an “official” poet and poem, I would suggest Sandburg and this one poem as the obvious choices.

Enjoy!

I am the People, the Mob
I am the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.