My aunt commutes from New Jersey to Manhattan every day. Last week, she emailed me asking if I knew anything about the protesters she had heard had taken up residence in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.
“The protest (as I understand it) is against Wall Street,” she wrote. “But how do you protest Wall Street?”
Not very well, apparently.
Since Sept. 17, protesters have occupied Manhattan in a movement against the Street with the motto, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” Right now, they stand in Manhattan, holding signs and chanting for change of the failing economy, the shrinking middle class and the end of big-business greed.
Unfortunately, the motto is just as vague as the movement. I was not surprised to learn that many Americans, even those who frequent the Big Apple, are unaware of their existence. Aside from brief and occasional reports of police brutality on the front lines, the mainstream media is ignoring the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Though some suspect a hidden agenda, the truth is that the protesters really aren’t all that newsworthy.
Dick Meyer, the executive editor for news of National Public Radio, said the protests “did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.” And while the numbers have been growing daily, not much has changed. The protests are in the name of a good cause, and the protesters themselves have good intentions and a positive goal, but nothing of significance has changed or will change because of them. Occupy Wall Street is little more than an unorganized, liberal rage-fest resulting in a false sense of empowerment. It’s admirable, but, at its current level, inconsequential.
Twenty-four-year-old Monica Christoffels is a dual-enrollment student at Lane Community College and the University, and has been an active protester since 2009. She was one of 1,252 people arrested in Washington D.C. for protesting the Tar Sands Pipeline in early September. Though she believes in Occupy Wall Street’s cause, she does not think that it is being approached correctly.
“It’s good to demand accountability, especially at this magnitude with these corporations,” Christoffels said. “But if you’re just going to call out a general group, no one is going to feel the pressure to respond. You need to focus your attentions and your efforts on something more specific.”
Specificity is severely lacking in the movement. There exists no leader, no spokesperson, no clear-cut goal and no definitive plan to achieve anything. The movement began with a general and all-encompassing ultimatum: the end of greed on Wall Street, which is unattainable by simply standing around a park in Manhattan, waving signs.
“People have taken it upon themselves to protest whatever they feel like protesting,” Christoffels said. ”It makes the whole protest organic: It is whatever people want it to be. All the issues people have are interconnected, but they’re all different.”
But an “organic” protest is not what the economy needs right now. It needs radical, deliberate, spearheaded changes, not a collection of struggling Americans who are satisfied with feeling productive rather than being productive.
The demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement are evolving daily, which makes them difficult to pin down. Everything from the smashing of the Wall Street bull statue to wide-scale debt forgiveness has been mentioned. These goals are understandable, but unrealistic — and I don’t see how the smashing of an inanimate bull would help. But I can see how people would want to be a part of the protests. It’s a way to release pent-up frustration with an unfair system. It’s a way to gain relief from a constant feeling of rage at overwhelming and seemingly endless inequalities, even if the relief is temporary and superficial.
To those who know about it, the movement is gaining momentum throughout the country, primarily through social networks like Reddit and Twitter. But it’s easy to arbitrarily agree with the broad ideas of a group of well-intentioned protesters. It’s harder to actually do something like closing your account with that big-budget bank or donating to a charity that better caters to your concerns. Better yet, become an educated voter and read up on what’s happening in the world, why it’s happening and how you can vote to help change it.
Occupy Wall Street is a hypothetical idea the American people need. It could be a means to bring attention to the many struggling Americans who, because of a failing economy and the selfishness of powerful organizations and the insanely rich, can barely make ends meet. It could be a first step toward the eventual fixing of the many problems plaguing the government and the many injustices that exist seemingly without consequences.
But first tries are rarely successful.