Protester – Time Magazine Person of the Year this year. Interesting. It seems there are protesters everywhere at this moment in history. The Middle East has just celebrated the “Arab Spring,” all brought about by the bravery of protesters who have come together using social media to connect and recognize they are not alone in their feelings of hopelessness and woe. We’ve watched as ordinary people have crowded into the streets and squares of cities that have long prohibited the right to assembly and have collectively protested the suppression of that right as well as so many other human rights. The protesters have been young and old, male and female, rich and poor, religious and secular, all with a common dream of equality and freedom.

I was a teenager in the late 1960’s and watched protesters in action in the United States. I saw Kent State students mowed down by bullets on my television screen, marched in a protest march to end the bombing in Vietnam, watched Martin Luther King lead peaceful protests in Alabama and in Washington, and listened to the protest songs of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I saw Black Panthers protesting the oppression of African Americans and watched the upsurge in Black Power. I watched feminists stand up and protest the oppression of women and had a mother who was one of those women whose life – and mine – were transformed by a shift in expectations for women, culminating her earning a Doctorate in Psychology at age 53 after having raised six children. I witnessed a whole generation of young people protesting conservative society and experimenting with more relaxed social mores in reference to the use of recreational drugs and sexuality. In other words, I grew up in the protest generation and am happy, and perhaps more comfortable, when I see people uniting to stand up for what they perceive to be social injustice.

Now in the U.S., we have the Wall Street protesters and I say, “Right on!” We need to speak out against the inequity between the rich and the poor and we need to gain more clarity as a nation about what constitutes right and wrong behavior in reference to money. The rich seems to be getting richer and the poor poorer and this is far from what the goals were of those protesters in the 1960’s, and certainly does not reflect what the Middle Eastern protesters are hoping will occur in their countries in the near future.

The lesson: we have to stay awake. We have to not grow complacent and lazy in our view of our limited world. We’re fine, so why should we care? We all need to care about others because how the poorest are treated in any society reflects on the values of the entire society. Protesters are those who have found their voices, who have come to recognize that what they feel is valid and that others feel the same way. It’s hard to shift from complacency to action, but not so hard when basic values are being threatened. When a middle class couple who are hard working find themselves without jobs or a home because of corporate greed, then one of the tenets of our Bill of Rights is threatened. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are considered “God given rights” in our Constitution and those very rights are at stake when our economy has been so compromised by institutional greed. I say, “Right on,” to Occupy Wall Street protesters and will join them in whatever way I can. The world needs protesters to stand up for what we all know are God-given rights. Now, where are you?