Occupy Wall Street

It's messy, and I think it's wonderful.



After all, this is what true democracy is really, really about -- the rights of Americans to pick themselves up and march against what they see as injustice, the ills of the society they live in. We have a rich heritage of doing just that in this country. But it seems like until now we had forgotten that.



It's wonderful to have it back!



Occupy Wall Street, like I said is messy. And that, I think is just what the good ole' US of A has been missing in its domestic discourse for way too long now. Our discourse has been about soundbites. Politicians say harmless little tidbits, wrapped in a bow for the 24 hour news cycle. Harmless and spineless little nothings.



That's why I love Occupy Wall Street. A vibrant democratic system should be messy, not about neat little soundbites, and that is exactly what Occupy Wall Street is.



In fact, there's a lot of criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement for not having specific, clear demands. Sorry, but isn't that exactly what a grass-roots movement of the people is all about? To have not specific, but a broad variety of demands? These are people of every walk of life, after all, who are fed up with what our society has evolved into -- where the power of the powerful has gotten way out of hand, leaving the other 99 percent virtually powerless. It would be pretty difficult to sum up their frustrations into just a few soundbites, right?



I think it was former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold who recently said that Occupy Wall Street will now show the country what a real protest movement is all about. I could not agree with that statement more. After all, now that a genuine, grass-roots protest movement has started to take hold in the United States, it's a bit more obvious that the so-called Tea Party was really full of shit, isn't it? I mean, what were those people really, except Republicans with a new name who opposed health care reform, right? What have they been screaming about? The government spending money to prevent the economy from falling off a cliff? Would they rather we had fallen off the cliff?? Aren't things bad enough?



The goal of this movement seems to be to give voice to the frustration of our nation's disempowered -- what the movement says is the 99 percent of us. And if it is just for the sake of giving that frustration voice, that is enough. This is a society, after all, where the voice of the average person is becoming increasingly ignored by the powers that be, whether it is the mainstream media or political parties. What we are witnessing unfold on the streets of our City is quite possibly the end of that.