I haven’t had much to say about the Occupy Wall Street protests — or any of the other Occupy <your-city-here> events — mostly because I don’t know what the protests are about. That’s not entirely my fault, because the protesters themselves don’t know why they’re there either. For example, check out this declaration of principles from the Occupy movement in my home town of Chicago:
Currently the participants of Occupy Chicago are expressing their voices together and developing an agreed Mission Statement and list of Grievances (to come soon).
So, sixty days of protesting in the streets, and they still don’t have a clue why they’re there. That’s not actually as bad as it sounds. I imagine that most of the individual protesters can explain why they’re there, but they’re having trouble finding a common cause. There’s nothing terribly wrong with that. Building a consensus is a process, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
I’m sure that in time the Occupy movements will reach maturity, by which I mean that charismatic psychopaths will scheme their way into leadership positions so they can steal donated money, and professional politicians (also charismatic psychopaths) will try to co-opt the movement to fulfill their own elective ambitions.
Welcome to the revolution, kids!
I was planning to write more, but I’m too tired. I think for my next post I’ll visit the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s New York Generally Assembly website, which doesn’t work well in Internet Explorer because that browser was created by an imperialist capitalist corporation.
Update: Part 2 is up.
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