The Occupy Wall Street movement is holding protests and strikes today to commemorate International Workers’ Day.
The movement, which protested economic equality in cities around the world, had grown quiet over the winter, but organizers hope the May Day events will rejuvenate the protests.
Lion’s Roar covered the Occupy movement extensively over the fall, with several authors writing about bringing Buddhist perspectives and practices to the protest movement. The principles in this coverage are useful even to those not involved in Occupy, as they help us bring mindfulness into standing up for what we believe in. See these below; links in open in new windows.
Benjamin Riggs wrote about the dangers of alienating the 1%, while David Loy and Michael Stone focused on how the capitalist economy encourages greed, and how Buddhism can help people shed their deeply held views of the current economic system. The Occupy movement grew out of Buddhist and countercultural movements of the 1960’s, as Jean Claude van Itallie explains.
