Originally Posted by
kidkboom 
It's clear to me that this is less about hearing what everyone has to say, and more about winning an argument, so I'll keep this concise, as i've already put three or four hours worth of work into this thread, and without much to show for it in the way of understanding each other.
In my opinion this movement is about one purpose: to wake people up. Particularly, to wake up people who are saying things similar to what you're saying, and there are many. To respond to the occupy movement by saying: "you need to get a job and move out of mommy's bassement" seems to me to be as biased and ill-informed as telling black plantation slaves in the 1800s to "just get an education and get a real job."
I'm leery to do this again: I swore I wouldn't get in another political debate on MR.com after the last one broke down so similarly - what happens next is, I try to describe the nature of the problem by explaining the common situation a lot of these people are going through; and the token republicans respond by telling me that it doesn't fit the description of THEIR life. I explain that jobs are requisite of education, that public/free education is a joke and doesn't GET jobs, that only those with the familial money to purchase education get tracked toward those jobs; then the republican tokens tell me that they got there through a grant and really hard work. I try to explain that the entire plane of business in america is corrupted and closed-door'd, that new businesses stand literally no hope in the face of these giant corporations that have enshadowed the entire playing field - Apple and the dread pirate Jobs own the cell-tech world, ConAgra owns the lion's share of the world's DNA, DuPont and AP own the world's political and commercial opinions, and so on. Then the republicans tell me about their own small business which they started (skipping neatly over the business college education they got and how it was paid for, and the hand-shaking they had to do with the existing businesses, the unions, the city and state governments, the special interests etc) .. They paint a Joe the Plumber picture that's really an extreme minority, but because somebody stands there and says "This is Everyman" x% of the readership believe him.
I'm saying all this to communicate to you that THERE IS A PROBLEM. Just because the problem has been sitting in one place for awhile, and hasn't moved, it doesn't make it a phantasm - it's real. The people on the OUTSIDE of wall street today don't have Roth IRAs, Harvard degrees, penthouses, pension plans, college savings for their kids and Gerber plans.. The people INSIDE of wall street do. (And it's lost 20-odd% value (oh no!) - that's nothing compared to the guy who lost 100% of his place to live in the same 'wave of recession'.)
At the end of the day, the problem is, capitalism is great, and I love the theory, but in practice - it's trumped by the injustice of a well-to-do individual munching on turkey legs while out the window, people are starving - that he wears italian sportcoats a few pockets shy of enough to hold his wallet, ipod, ipad bluetooth and blackberry; and the people outside keep their heads try with paper bags. The essence of the problem is, if there's no way toward success provided to a certain group of people, they're enslaved. And enslaved people WILL fight, and they'll be perfectly willing to die in the process, since it's often a better option to die fighting than to waste away unseen. It seems to me that if democrats would just accept the supine position of financial inferiority, and die off under the weight of their problems, that would be a fine solution for most republicans. if i had one, that would break my heart.
Until those folks become willing to take the other half of the country on as their responsibility and comrades both, this is just going to be hatfield-and-mccoy stupidity.
For this movement to accomplish goals, I will refrain: it needs a LEADER. I would say it needs a politician willing to represent its goals, and then find that the mob moves to the voting polls in support of this individual; but we got burned last time. I've watched for 4 years as every cotton-pickin thing Obama tried to do got shut down by the Republican army, both through legitimate means, and sneaky ones. And it's a wicked pisser because the whole time I knew that at the end of the four years, this same group would look at Obama's failed attempts as defeats that HE caused, when we all know better, we all watched him battle with the other branches of government in a stalemate that amounted to "blacklist: Obama". These people are a group of moneyed american elitists who never woke up from the H3 dream of the 90s, who wore Bush's tenure as president like a mink coat to protect them against all the madness of the world around them after 9-11, like some collective Scarlett O'Hara coming down the recession stairs in a curtain. And as opposed to join with the rest of their countrymen in achieving A SOLUTION THAT'S WORKABLE FOR EVERYONE, they have spent years throwing the bodies of american youth at the fire of the middle east like some crazed religious sacrifical priests, maybe hoping all the while to dwindle the population numbers that thwart their financial success by demanding those last few coveted pennies be allotted to feeding people who need food, and such other trivial democrat-ish things. Certainly they were hoping that by falling on outdated and defunct 50s-era callbacks like "military tradition" and "family values" that they would somehow revert the messed up world we live in back to the era of riding high on fossil fuel and commandeered assets from third-world countries. Apparently the new definiton of recession is the Hamptons maintain fiscal stasis while Brooklyn starves to death - and it surprises everyone that there's dissent about this?
But it's still a moot point.. We couldn't have a leader now - where would we get one? - unless this went from protest to riot, and then it would be silenced in one quick mortar-blast fired by the 33% of our country who serve in the military and have received military training that employs techniques picked right up out of hitler camps - the sleep deprivation, nutritional deprivation, followed by political indoctrination in a brain-stressed state - so that doesn't lead us anywhere good, either.
And if there was a gandhi in that crowd? well, you wouldn't notice him. you'd be busy assuming he lives in his parent's basement, and telling him to stop trying to get a buck off of you, and go get a haircut and a real job.
Sigh... my sincerest apologies to Lampada for having to read through all my crud. feeling kind of guilty about that.
