To paraphrase a Bob Dylan song, “Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Ms. Bellafante?”
A New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante is but one of many establishment reporters and pundits who’ve been covering the fledgling “Occupy Wall Street ” movement – but completely missing the story. Instead of really digging into what’s “happening here,” they’ve resorted to fuddy-duddy mockery of an important populist protest that has sprouted right in Wall Street’s front yard.
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In her article, Bellafante dismissed the young people’s effort as “fractured and airy,” calling it a “carnival” in an “intellectual vacuum.” Their cause is so “diffuse and leaderless,” she wrote, that its purpose is “virtually impossible to decipher.” Participation, she announced, is “dwindling.”
Whew – so snide! Yet, so wrong.
While the establishment is befuddled by the plethora of issues and slogans within the protest and put off by its festive spirit, that’s their problem. The 20-and-30-somethings who are driving this movement know what they’re doing and are far more organized than those accustomed to conventional hierarchical protests seem able to comprehend.
It’s silly to say that the protestors’ purpose is indecipherable. Hello – they’re encamped next door to Wall Street, isn’t that a clue? They want what America’s workaday majority wants: stop the gross greed of financial and corporate elites, and expel a political class that’s so corrupted by the money of those wealthy elites that it has turned its back on the middle class and the poor.
Such movements don’t begin with a neat set of solutions, but with roiling outrage focused on the plutocratic perpetrators of injustice. These young people are on target… and on the move. Don’t ridicule them, join them! Go to www.OccupyWallSt.org.
“Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim,’ The New York Times, September 23, 2011.
“The Bankers and the Revolutionaries,” The New York Times, October 2, 2011.
“Occupy Wall Streets grows up, out,” Austin American Statesman, October 3, 2011.
“Many Are Driven by Contempt of Political Class,” The New York Times, September 28, 2011.
“Anti-Wall Street Protests Spreading to Cities Large and Small,” The New York Times, October 4, 2011.
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