Mainstream media’s depiction of the protesters has, up to now, generally been negative. At first, major news channels and newspapers were completely ignoring the protests. After protesters made it clear that they were going to continue fighting, despite mass arrests and widespread claims of police harassment, editors nationwide cannot help to report on it.
The same publications that ignored the movement at first now tend to repeatedly emphasize the protests’ apparent lack of purpose. Even when they give protesters the benefit of the doubt – CNN, MSNBC, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, have done that, if sparingly – they often still claim that for the protests to be successful they need to have a clearer message.
And this is because the message of the protests, due to the nature of its participants’ grievances, is not as blatantly obvious at first glance as others that have already taken place this year.
Activists have not congregated at Liberty Square to overthrow a dictator, like they did in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. Nor do they aim to violently overthrow the government, like protesters did against Moammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya. And Occupy Wall St. protesters cannot point to a particular event that set them off, like Tunisian citizens did to overthrow Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after Mohamed Bouazizi sacrificed his life to protest the Tunisian government’s oppression.
The United States has a democratically elected government and the government generally does not infringe upon its citizens’ freedom of speech. Critics of the Occupy Wall St. movement point to this as proof that protesters and activists, in the absence of a clear message, are motivated by nihilism.
But you say there’s no message in these protests? Hold on. Anyone who pays attention to current events knows that this movement is fundamentally grounded in a very clear rejection of the status quo and the inequalities it continues to engender.
Even President Obama, in an interview with ABC on October 3, pointed to the high unemployment rate as a sign that Americans are no better off than they were four years ago. Republicans will point to this as proof that there needs to be a change in the White House, but this is not a problem with the administration; for decades, our government has bent to the will of Wall Street, deregulating and letting financial institutions run amok in the quest for a higher profit margin. In 2008, the system crashed and now the rest of society has to carry the burden. After all, many of the financial institutions that were at risk in October 2008 have since posted record margins.
As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread all over the country, and as a clearer picture of protesters begins to emerge – young, educated, disillusioned – the purpose of the movement should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to the news. While the base of the movement has since diversified, the average protester remains the same (for now).
The national unemployment rate hovers at around 9%. For people under the age of 24, who, presumably, cannot be blamed for Washington’s acquiescence to Wall Street? The figure is over 18%. Our generation did not lead our country’s military into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Yemen, but the country’s youth has done a disproportionate amount of the fighting. We are the most vulnerable to Washington’s decisions, yet we have too few politicians that represent or protect our interests.
Occupy Wall Street (and the other protests that it has inspired) is not a nihilist movement. This is our generation’s mass political awakening, similar to what our parents experienced in the late 1960s, when they decided that the government had lost touch with public will. We, too, have decided that enough is enough.
For critics who deride the movement’s significance by pointing to the relatively low number of activists, the symbolic value of the protests should not be ignored. After all, didn’t our generation propel Senator Obama to the White House? Generation Y came out in record numbers, volunteering our time and energy to electing someone we thought better represented our values.
On that note, a message to President Obama: Hope and change may have been your campaign slogan, but we adopted it as our mantra. As these movements spread across the country and as more young people come to identify with the cause, you have to decide whether those words meant anything more than empty rhetoric. Our generation believes in this country and its people, but we fundamentally reject the inequalities that have become clear as our financial system falls apart.
David Weigel, writing for Slate Magazine, points out that, although anarchists and minarchists in the crowd may disagree, “Occupy Wall Street is post-Obama left-wing populism.” As the movement goes beyond its early leaders’ political views and comes to embody a more general dissatisfaction with the current system, we must begin to reinterpret how we label it.
As more people, including myself, but also unions, retirees, and the country’s masses of unemployed citizens, come to sympathize with the movement’s ideals, we can no longer label it a minor protest led by the radical Left; as it continues to grow, this has the potential to become a full-fledged social movement.
As this emerging movement begins to gain traction, our society should celebrate it as a refutation of our current market-oriented society and a defense of the citizen-oriented society that this country and its people deserve. The market should bend to the will of the people; politicians should not rush to protect the market at the expense of the interests of the citizenry. And this is not empty rhetoric: when four in five Americans disapprove of the current political system, politicians should take note.
Many protesters hold views more radical than mine; like Nicholas Kristof, I too acknowledge that the market can raise living standards when functioning properly. But our market is clearly not functioning properly, and our generation is going to bear the brunt of the effects of its actions. So if young people decide that enough is enough and take to the streets, the media should not ask, “Why are you doing this?” It should ask, instead, “What took you so long?”
And to the people of our generation, whether you’re currently enrolled in college or not: the pioneers of this movement have proven that our generation can demand to be heard if it so chooses. We should not let that power go to waste. Instead of cynically deriding the protesters, or closing the browser page after reading the news article and going on with our day, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to future generations to get involved.Washington may think that it can ignore the thousands of activists camped out at Liberty Park. Can it ignore millions?
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