Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it

[Matariki]

(great article, worth reading - on cnn of all places)

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index.html

<snip>

Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.
.....

In fact, we are witnessing America's first true Internet-era movement, which -- unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign -- does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.

Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem.

<much more>

[unkachuck]

1. K&R....n/t

[mdmc]

2. 1

[MrScorpio]

3. It's in danger of becoming "just a phase".

This a long standing habit in the American psyche to back up this possibility. Movements has lost steam when they needed to step it up many a time...

What the movement needs is to go past the tipping point, to grow and add people by spreading the value of its worth to other people OUTSIDE of the most hard core protesters.

It has to go Main Street and beyond and stay there.

It has to resonate and remain sustained.

This is the most crucial time, the next few weeks. Winter's coming and people must be willing to brave the coming cold and persist.

[Matariki]

6. What you said.

[tama]

7. Everything is just a phase

You can't step twice in the same river, as Heraclitus said. But you can go with the flow.

[customerserviceguy]

8. Well said

Also, it needs to remember something about the tea party's success. They made it look like it was only between themselves and congresscritters, they could claim plausible deniabilty when it came to the effects on ordinary people.

If the OWS folks look like they're screwing around with everyday people who are just trying to go about their business, or seek a bit of the pleasures of a great city, then they will fail.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. My quibble, this has a lot more in common with

the 1730s... and 40s...

but the writer is correct.

[Cool Logic]

5. "government corruption" is the root of the problem...

For all of the transgressions you cited were made possible by government intervention in business. The evils, popularly ascribed to "big corporations" are not the result of an unregulated industry, but of state power over industry. The villain is not the businessman; rather, it is the legislator.

[gordianot]

9. I am all for what is going on it appears to me real people have been absent too long.

The phony grass roots Tea Party imagined a populist awakening. Now thanks to to a variety of factors mainly social media one is getting started. It was inevitable, predicted and seems to be world wide. I do have an answer to right wingers when they complain. Blame Ronald Reagan when he asked if you are better off?

[madrchsod]

10. it`s a wave...