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I made the mistake of reading the comments on a local news station article re: Occupy Wall Street. I should know better than to do that, but here was my response to someone saying “These people don’t know what they want.”
“That is garbage. They are there because there are millions of people just like them, and there are a million threads that make up the unifying theme of despair and disparity that are directly tied to the tiny thread of capitalist prosperity which has been guiding this country, and leaving the majority left out of any sense of power or security. You would get a million answers, a million stories, if you asked them each individually what is driving them, but there is no such disunion in the faction which has put them there.
Empathy, sympathy, poverty, disadvantage, racism, sexism, educational pursuit, health problems, ignorance, ignore-ance, exclusion, repression, abandonment, disjunction, induced apathy, powerlessness, ineffectualness, and the many other things that have kept people overwhelmed to the point of paralysis are much harder to express when the numbers swell to such incomprehensible numbers. “Profit” is much easier to understand, and much easier to numerically outline, than the value of utilitarianism, or pain, or justice.
The reason there is trouble to express the many different needs or wants of the protesters is because they are so diffuse, but at the same time united in purpose: deprivation. They/we are being deprived of so much, and from so many angles, that the only thing that has come to the forefront of that is the desperation that accompanies deprivation.
Too many of the problems expressed by the protesters arise from this deprivation, and resultant desperation, and that is not profitable. Thus it is cast aside by the likes of you, who are unable to empathize with these million stories, when the glint of gold flashes in your eyes instead. It is easier to cast aside the millions begging for change, when you see only the change in your pocket, and not the potential change in the world.
The irony is that you, yourself, are probably in the 99%. To paraphrase Steinbeck, you probably don’t see yourself as an exploited poor, but “a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.”“
