Is This the New Normal?

I am watching Sunday morning news reports while reading Google computer generated news items and, as the scramble of images fires up my brain, I wonder: Is the ugliness of today and media presentations the sign of a new "normal"?

President Obama is faced with another budget showdown on September 30 if our legislators cannot agree on another budget extension. That means another "a-ha!" moment for seniors who wonder if social security checks will be issued October 1.

And that is not the best part....

President Obama has trumpeted that the challenge facing our country is the choice of taxing our millionaires and billionaires...or making seniors pay more for Medicare. "Its simple math..." he says.

The issues going on behind the scenes break down to scaling back tax subsidies, letting Bush tax cuts expire, or making the investments tax a flat 15%. Presently, many wealthy investors manage to pay much less or even zero dollars as they take advantage of tax breaks and deductions. The Republican alternative is to cut back on seniors' Medicare and Social Security benefits while keeping billionaires tax structure status quo.

Has anyone heard about the protests in Wall Street this week? Protests so large that 80 people were brutally arrested in just one day? There seems to be a media blackout about volatility in the heart of our New York financial district. There are hundreds of protesters, living in the streets, until their point is made. We are covering the events in Syria and Arab countries more thoroughly than we are in New York City.

What is going on here? Do any of you remember the protests of the sixties? I do. I remember Kruschev pounding his shoe at the UN. We were huddled in the Student Center at Rutgers at the time and were sure that a bomb was going to be launched at any minute. I remember protests about the Vietnam war. Getting married and dropping out of school meant that my husband was deferred from being drafted in that ill devised entry which cost thousands of American lives. I remember Kent University and the Black Freedom movement, I remember Michael Luther King before he became charismatic Martin Luther King and the symbol of African American justice in America. I remember those protests and the media coverage that let the rest of the world understand their messages.

So how come there is no coverage about this protest in New York? This "Occupy Wall Street" protest is intended to bring attention to their desperation: "We are the 99 percent...getting kicked out of our homes...forced to choose between groceries...medical care...getting nothing while the other one percent is getting everything."

Some protesters have joined ranks as college graduates with hefty tuition bills, over a hundred thousand dollars, with no job opportunities in sight. Others have lost homes and find the tent city accommodations on the street to be their "normal".

Wall Street has become demonized, but more importantly, what was once viewed as an engine of our capitalist economy is now facing transparency, regulation, more bankruptcies, for a new reality. These 21st century protestors march for the same human basic needs as those in France and Russia a hundred years ago.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Lets hope this is not the new "Normal".

Seniors vote.