Jon Stewart, as always, has found a way to cut through the absurdity of a mainstream press trying to marginalize a growing populist movement just two years after it overplayed the conservative Tea Party’s import, helping the right-wing movement grow.
But rather than explain this, I’ll leave it to Mr. Stewart to explain:
Let’s be clear. The protests in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are more than a side show. They are a natural outgrowth of the disregard with which the government and America’s financial elites hold the American people. Like Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network, they are screaming “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.”
That’s why the specifics of the demands are irrelevant.
It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”
Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.
And screw us they have. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not abated, the cost of health care continues to rise, as do taxes on middle class taxpayers (in the form of state and local taxes), and we are told that our problems are being caused by greedy teachers and cops and not by a war-addicted government whose election campaigns are funded by the very people who should be brought to account for the country’s downward spiral.
But the TV pundits still make fun of the hippies in the crowd (forgetting the absurd site of grown men dressed as colonial revolutionaries and wearing tea bags from their tri-cornered hats). What we are witnessing in lower Manhattan and throughout the country is exactly what is needed — a rebellion designed to take back the American government from the financial elites, who think they own our government.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 
First the media ignored the Occupy Wall Street protesters, then they mocked and ridiculed the protesters as being dumb, uniformed, stinky, unemployed bums and now they are demonizing and swift boating them non stop as being a dangerous mob. That vicious harpy Ann Coulter mocks and demeans them, what else is new? I hope the OWS protesters can keep it up. The police have been very brutal and vicious and it will probably get worse. The main thing is that the protesters must remain peaceful and nonviolent. So far so good. You would think that libertarians would be supporting these people but of course you would be wrong. Libertarians only support the rich and powerful, the so called job creators, the producers. The libertarian clowns look down on the so called moochers, peons and ordinary serfs.