Occupy

I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I feel like on the one hand there are legitimate grievances to be aired, and protest has been effective in the past? It also balances out the tea party kind of nicely, except that I'm not sure the media coverage has been the same. I think it highlights the various hypocrisies all of us bring to political discourse in general. I guess ultimately, I don't really believe it'll go anywhere. Elections aren't until next year, and who has the attention span to continue to care for that long? I also don't know how the demographic of the protesters breaks down and I feel like that's important to the legitimacy of the movement. Is it really all just kids who are upset that basket-weaving won't pay off their debts like they thought it would? Or is it the guys that lost their blue-collar jobs and have legit tried to get re-hired for a year and a half and now benefits are running out and they have three kids and no idea how to provide?

Also, Menino had a point. It's all well and good to be all at Wall St. But punishing everyone else, most of who are also just trying to get by, is not cool. So I guess they need to target better.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

It's not just "kids trying to get an education." It's the whole follow your dream mentality, which feeds a sense of entitlement in turn supported by heavy collegiate marketing that has kids making bad investments and getting screwed. It's sympathetic, but tangentially related? Related to a lesser degree than people who lost houses and jobs and so forth?

Re: being inconvenienced, some guy who's trying to get to his job and has to suffer through 3 hours of a traffic jam because protesters shut down a bridge has very little to do with investment bankers ruining the economy. Also re: crushing poverty, that was why I asked the question about the demographics. It matters a lot who's actually doing the protesting.

But yes, I totally concede that when the protesters are all impoverished and everyone who is negatively impacted by the protests are complicit in or directly responsible for everything going to shit then sure, behind them 100%.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yeah, started my original post with ambivalence for a reason. Trying to illustrate that it's not so easy to take an all or nothing approach to this. Essentially yeah, if the world were extremely simple, then making a moral judgment on this shit would be easy. It isn't.

Law degrees are actually a good example of the victimization of prospective students by aggressive recruitment. Look at proliferation of law schools in recent years, graduating ever increasing numbers of JD's at an exorbitant profit margin. I feel really bad for those kids. I feel like that is an entirely different kind of exploitation than what is being protested.

Yes, there are kids who feel entitled to have everything they ever dreamed while working whatever job is going to fulfill their souls. I'm not saying they're representative of these protesters. I was asking. There were competing narratives re: privileged white kids vs. actually disenfranchised people.

All I'm saying regarding the situation that happened in Boston was that I'm not prepared to say that everyone with a job who is trying to continue working is complicit in this ruination of the economy, and yet people in just that situation are being negatively impacted by the protests. The only other example which springs to mind is sit-ins in the civil rights movement, but in that case, everyone who was impacted WAS complicit in racial segregation. Maybe other protests, say, anti-war for Vietnam were equally a pain in the ass for everyone whether or not they were involved. Don't know. I'm working from the perspective that the dude who keeps his head down and just tries to do his job doesn't deserve the hassle for being lucky.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.