"Occupy???"

Good Saturday afternoon to you all and what a beautiful day God has given us.  Today I feel really good, we had three of our grand kids with us last night and today and I have just spent three hours rebuilding a completed syllabus for Spring Semester when the fresh, compelling opportunity / idea came to me focusing on a great, local company, the Timken Company.  That is a story for another day but for this afternoon I wish to focus the spotlight of my brain on this latest people uprising in America, the Occupy Somethingorothersomewheresomething!

I have been invited by some very good colleagues to attend the one here in Canton, have been asked many questions about my thoughts on the "movement" and have yet to give an opinion for, well, I have not formulated one; still haven't, really!  But here are some thoughts that sort of frame my sense of what is going on.  First, I am not against the movement ... entirely, until it becomes a media spectacle, which I think is the prime motivation to begin with, frankly.  Secondly,  there is a fine line between a crowd and a mob for I have had to deal with both in my life and I detest them both, frankly.  For mobs take on a mind and a will of its own most of the time veering away from the original good intent of the gathering.  That is my concern as this movement mushrooms before the camera lights and the police interaction is turning more volatile.  We all watched the Arab Spring all summer so perhaps we are on the threshold of an American Fall?

But the centerpiece of this whole movement is the poisoned partisanship we are all sick and tired of enhanced by this growing sense of desperation around the question, can America truly gain traction toward recovery?  I think it a valid question for, frankly, my belief in that traction is getting weaker by the day as I watch the dots in the global constellation connect in very interesting ways.  I have said to many and again here that with Putin rising to power again in Russia and the BRICS alliance strengthening led by Russia, now, and China, the geometry is changed for a generation at least.

We all long for the good old days I know but, first, there have not been any real good old days when you had to live through them but more importantly, the inhabitants of our global village are having now to dance a different rhythm, sing in multiple languages and try to grasp the theories of the music as never before.  The world has, well, changed. Whether that change will be for the good or the bad is yet to be made visible for the emulsion is still brewing. 

As I sit here on this Saturday afternoon and as I watched three of my grand kids eating breakfast this morning, ages 9, 8 and 7, I was taken by the fact that their lives are so much different than when I was 9, 8 or 7 and then when I think about their children when they are 9, 8 and 7 in about twenty years, what will their world really be and act like?

I will close by simply saying that in my humble opinion, the ONLY thing that needs to be "Occupied" is filling your mind and your heart and thus your soul with the love of a God that loves us when we do not deserve it and proved it by sending His Son to earth to live a short while only to be killed a terrible way to redeem my wrongs through that shed blood. Now, for me, THAT is something worth OCCUPYING!