There is a facebook page devoted to people who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in my hometown of Ford City, Pennsylvania. Every now and then I post something of contemporary relevance. I have posted about Marcellus shale drilling in the area, the burning of all sorts of toxic trash in people's backyards, and a coupe of days ago, about OWS. Each time, the responses have been vitriolic. I have been called a communist, a person with ulterior motives, a person pressing his agenda on others, a deeply unhappy person, a person trying to ruin the happy memories of others, and so forth. People won't even admit that there was and is lots of racism in the town. I was called unhappy for bringing this up. In the OWS post, I simply asked what people from and in my hometown thought of OWS. When one person replied with nonsense about how ACORN was behind this and it was all a plot by Obama to manipulate us, I responded by saying that this seemed straight out of Fox News. Then all hell broke loose. The consensus seemed to be that the site was suppposed to be about people's happy memories of those halcyon days when they grew up. When all was right with the world. Something was seriously wrong with me for bringing up politics. One person said that the town was such a happy place that when we left the town, we all got a rude awakening from the real world. And she doubted that we talked about or knew about politics when we were young. OWS has hit a nerve for maybe millions of us. However, while my hometown is today a particularly fucked up place, I always try to remember that there is plenty of hate out there for us too. So we really do need to stick together, to act as if an injury to one of us really is an injury to all of us. Let's disagree, vigorously and sometimes impolitely, but let's always give the right answer to the question, Which Side Are You On.