I’ve admittedly not paid as much attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement as I should have until only recently, so have been playing “catch-up” over the past few days. When you live at home and work alone, and spend the majority of your free time in the company of dogs and cats, it can be easy to lose touch, intentionally or not, with the “real” world.
Still, I’ve paid enough attention to know that the OWS folks are not making any specific demands; that is even one of the knocks on them from some quarters.
I’ve also paid enough attention to know that a pretty broad spectrum of society is represented--the protesters aren’t all college students, or all poor people, or all urban or rural or Yankee or Californian or New Yorker or southern or Midwestern; they are not all unemployed, they are not all disgruntled post office workers; and, so far, at least, they’re not putting up guillotines or mobbing perceived “rich” people.
Seems to me that, mostly, they are interested in “fairness.” It’s not that 1% of the population is “rich,” but rather that the “more” they have has grown so geometrically quickly, while the “less” the 99% have has shrunken nearly as geometrically quickly.
Picture two snowballs: One, rolled downhill, adds layers, grows larger and larger; the other, rolled uphill, if at all, grows little, if at all. After 20 years or 30 years of rolling, the first snowball is enormous, couldn’t be moved with a fleet of earthmoving equipment; the other, despite working as hard as it can, could still be the middle section of a 3-snowball snowman built by happy 7-year-olds.
Basically they seem to be asking why, if "a rising tide lifts all boats," tide seems to be so picky-and-choosey in deciding which boats it will lift, in this particular case. It's as if the tide rolled in and picked just one boat to lift out of the hundred tied up at the dock. There's something wrong, here.
To me it seems the OWS’s complaints are valid (of course, I am one of the 99%). They are not demanding handouts--or anything else, really. They want only to be heard, and they want everyone to become aware that this growing discrepancy between the 1% and the rest of us could very well end up destroying us. It has destroyed more than a few of us, already.
So then I read about a “backlash” organization, the “53%”--based on the “fact” that 47% of the citizens of this country pay no income taxes. That 47% just really pisses the 53% off. They don’t seem to be aware of precisely who comprises that 47% un(income)taxed people--elderly on social security, people who don’t make enough money (because the jobs they do have been annually devalued for at least 20-30 years), etc. There are a LOT of working people in that 47%, but the 53-percenters seem to be unaware of that.
They also seem to believe that OWS is demanding more government assistance, more “handouts.”
Obviously, they are not paying attention--they are not listening. They’re just seeing a bunch of goddamn lazy losers trying to get more of their hard-earned dollars. Or something.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” No matter how much “communication,” via email and Twitter and Facebook, et al, we seem to be doing.
Maybe we really are destined for the dustbin of history. And sooner, rather than later.
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