Many thanks to Nicole Taggart of Occupy Martinsburg for contributing today's blog post!

I feel like I was in the wrong place during the first week when Zuccotti Park was occupied by protestors. Instead of being with like-minded people, I came off a camping trip with people whom I didn’t know were racist. I put my truck in 4 wheel drive and speed away from a misconception. In a way, my experience is the small town equivalent of what was happening in New York: I pointed out racism and slothful malignance; the occupiers did something about the big picture that causes both.

I have heard some small city occupiers discuss the need to grow and they look towards people who have already made affiliations with other populist movements, notably the Tea Party. A couple of people whom I know, tell me that the Tea Baggers they know are a well-healed people, or “rich white Republicans,” as one friend told me. I know only Tea Party supporters who called Obama the n-word before knowing anything about him and who want to deport a lot of people.

These disenfranchised Faux News watchers are intensely afraid of losing what they have, and they want to hold on to a patriotic, homogenous image of America. Certainly, they need to be afraid of losing what they have: we all do and that is why we Occupy, whither it is in a park, a building that was foreclosed, or in our states of mind. But, the image that the Tea Party supporters have of America is a mirage in both America’s ever-changing melting pot and in citizens not being rewarded equally due to their work, or, not being able to achieve the American dream via the current political and economic system.

To think that members of the Tea Party and Occupy will automatically find “common ground” is naïve. This can take place over time. Years ago, one woman in Scotland, told me about her work with the 1984 Miner Strike. She told me that the miners had been a “rather nasty sexist lot,” but this changed once they were being supported in the picket line by women, who also fed them. One week a cheesecake picture, “Page 3” from Murdoch’s The Sun was up at the picket line, and the next week, it was a feminist article. More common is the experience of our veterans, one good ol’ boy who served in Vietnam told me, “I used to be a racist until I went to Vietnam and had a black guy on one side and Puerto Rican guy on the other protecting my ass.” It will only take time and struggle to change the people who comprise the Tea Baggers that I know. For, as we know, we all have been ripped off by the 1% and the government which protects it.

We cannot water down our discontent. But, we cannot forget the unity that we have with our brothers and sisters of color or who are gay or transgendered in order to appease any other group of people who are being hurt by the 1%. To do this, would be to sell out our own and would be as morally corrupt as scabbing. No – instead, let’s be ourselves and let them awaken from the slothful malign and ignorance to taste the bitterness of their discontent, for what we have to offer them is the same unity and sense of empowerment which we are experiencing.