Why should those of minority faiths and spiritualities care about the Occupy Wall Street movement? This is about government and corporations and banks and corrupt executives, right? Yes, it is, and it still affects us – maybe not directly, but it does.

The fundamental idea behind the Occupy movement is to remove Big Business influence from the government. The bigger corporations in this country have systematically been removing a lot of the restrictions (just one example of many) that were placed upon them to provide cleaner, safer work environments and produce less smog and emissions. That in and of itself should be enough to get anyone of a Nature-based spirituality to get up in arms. Respect and reverence for the Earth does NOT include poisoning the water and the air. However, a certain major religion in this country believes the Earth is here for them to use up without any consideration for future generations – or even the current one, for that matter. Which leads me to my next concern…..

The mindset of human dominance(as opposed to harmony) over the Earth is predominantly a Christian viewpoint. As this belief is filtered through the bigger corporations and into the government, a more conservative ideal is introduced and accepted. Time and again we’ve heard a number of politicians announce, “This is a Christian nation!” Pushing policy through based on a single religious view is incredibly dangerous for a country that was supposed to founded on a principle of religious equality.

Please understand!!! I know not all Christians believe we should just trash the planet. I’m not out to attack anyone or any religion. What I’m trying to point out it, these businesses are using some religious dogma as a reason to change environmental policies. Now that I think about it, if I were Christian, that would piss me off, too!

So here we are faced with politicians and extremely well-paid executives using their own beliefs to get policies pushed through that are ultimately damaging to the human race. And if we stand up to protest these policies, we are branded as tree-hugging hippie Pagans. Well, ok, some of us ARE tree-hugging hippie Pagans, but we make up just a small percentage of the people who would really, really like to see the corporations out of politics and government. Anyway, if you’ve been reading and keeping up with the news from New York and the bigger cities that have Occupy movements going on, then you’ve probably read some of the negative comments coming from these politicians and executives. They are of the mind-set that anyone involved with the Occupy movement is trying to destroy the government and destroy Wall Street and they obviously don’t love their country and they’re obviously just a mob of unwashed hippies and they’re obviously liberals/anarchists/communists. And yes, those awful, immoral Pagans are even involved.

Holy crap – the world is coming to an end.

There is a lot of misinformation being spread about the Occupy movement. Those that would like to see it fail are twisting the goals and picking up on the most extreme fringe individuals to say these are the people responsible for “trying to destroy our nation.” We don’t want to destroy it – we want to make it better. Corporations are not evil – they need to be changed. Government is not evil – it needs to be changed. We are not looking for handouts or ridiculous tax changes or a redistribution of wealth. At our most basic, we simply want corporate America out of our government, so that our politicians can go back to work doing what they were supposed to be doing in the first place – representing the people.