Or is is going to be a brief flash in the pan, with no lasting effects?
I'd like to think the former. I fear the latter. One of my metrics is how many of the privileged college students on my campus really get involved, or whether most will continue their lives of self-absorption. So far, there's not a lot of activity. College students ain't what they used to be.
RMJ at Adventus
The Occupy Wall Street "movement" seems to be less about recreating the democratic republic in miniature, and more about reclaiming the ancient Greek ideal of "democracy." It is not unknown in this country, the idea that democracy means listening to all the voices of all the people. The man standing at the town hall meeting is a citizen entitled to be heard like very other citizen, where the vote is a consensus of those gathered, not the decision of representatives. If Occupy Wall Street doesn't have one message to convey, that is because it is conveying a message by what it is rather than just by what it says. Ironically, in this web-linked and internet besotted age, actions still speak louder than words. And trying to reduce actions to words is as much a distortion as trying to reduce the parables of Jesus to simply moral homilies.Richard Eskow at HuffPo
How do you end insanity? By seeing the reality as it is - not by seeing parts of the truth, but by seeing the whole. You start by seeing that we're being run by, and manipulated by, a system. It's a corporate system that drives our politics, our news, and even our entertainment. You begin to see it as a system that's overthrown our basic values and discarded our basic sense of decency, replacing themwith an exaltation of consumerism and a condemnation of the unfortunate.
People have been waiting for someone to connect the dots. They've been waiting for someone to explain how these forces act together and work totether to exploit us. They want to know how and why they'e been losing their wealth, their security, and even their self-esteem.
The #OccupyWallSt protestors are succeeding. They're carrying the message - and they're being heard. They've won over the Transit Workers Union, the Airline Pilots Union, the SEIU, and - in an echo of Tahrir Square - soldiers in uniform who are willing to defend them. You don't do that by proposing a financial transactions tax, as important as that is. You do that by demanding an end to the insanity, the madness that's being manufactured and distributed every day by the leaders of corporate America.
Douglas Rushkoff at CNN:
The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.
And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.
