Killer Aces Media cofounder, poker player, Drupal evangelist, dude.

In A People’s History of the United States (read online), published in 2003, Howard Zinn wrote a chapter called “The Coming Revolt of the Guards.”

That essay could be, should be, the rallying cry of the Occupation.

The wealth disparity is glaring, and it has grave social consequences:

One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth.

The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.

It’s true. One percent of the people own more than a third of America’s wealth; the next nine percent richest own another 39%; and the remaining 28% of wealth is owned by the bottom 90% of the population. Charts and data.

The middle 9%, those in the 90-99% percentile in wealth, are the people Zinn calls the “guards of the system.”

In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen.

These people–the employed, the somewhat privileged–are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

It’s the middle class, the professionals and homeowners, who are giving steam to the movement. The highly trained individuals who have been laid off, these are the people out on the streets.  They feel expendable, and realize how far from the 1% they really are.

The Occupation was inevitable, but globalization and the Internet has hastened its arrival.

The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government–to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.

We should have seen this coming.  The discontentment in America has been spreading upwards.

There is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the guards. We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn’t care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government… thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left.

This is why the Occupation matters. It’s why politicians should pay attention–the 99% are looking for solutions from anyone, not just the Democrats.

The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

The threat of unemployment, always inside the homes of the poor, has spread to white-collar workers, professionals. A college education is no longer a guarantee against joblessness’, and a system that cannot offer a future to the young coming out of school is in deep trouble. If it happens only to the children of the poor, the problem is manageable; there are the jails. If it happens to the children of the middle class, things may get out of hand. The poor are accustomed to being squeezed and always short of money, but in recent years the middle classes, too, have begun to feel the press of high prices, high taxes.

Is now the time for radical change? Is that why the protesters aren’t behind a specific piece of legislation, but rather is advocating a wholesale change in national priorities and attitudes?

With the Establishment’s inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change. Let us be Utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that “realism” so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of action, that “realism” anchored to a certain kind of history empty of surprise.

This part gave me goosebumps for how aptly it describes what is going on around the country, and for reminding me what the protesters really want. (Map of cities under occupation.)

But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the rebels. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States….

There is a chance that such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never done-bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite’s weapons, money, control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population.

And finally, here’s the call to action to me, as a part of the bourgeois class:

We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.