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Two
weeks of protests on Wall Street have spawned sympathetic demonstrations
across the U.S., but it’s too early to say whether a full-fledged
political movement with charismatic leadership will emerge. While
demonstrators have noticeably lacked the passion and focus of 1960s campus
radicals, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that today’s
somewhat angry crowds will tomorrow make up for their docility with tenacious
sticking power. For the time being, though, the
objects of their ire are so nebulous that the demonstrators might as well be
targeting food additives or the juicing of baseballs to get attention.
“The one thing we have in common is that We Are the 99% that will no
longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” reads the
wishy-washy manifesto of, for one, Seattle activists. Let’s hope,
however, that if mere intolerance of greed and corruption eventually turns
into anger, as it well may, that the torch mobs will be able to distinguish
the scoundrels who run the banking system from all of us small-businessmen
and entrepreneurs whom Mr. Obama would designate
as “rich” simply because we have lounge privileges at the
nation’s airports. Perhaps the protestors would be surprised to learn
that many of the traders and market-watchers who weigh in regularly at the Rick’s
Picks
forum explicitly agree that greed and corruption have
claimed America’s very soul. Far be it from us, however, to discourage
activists with the cynical observation, oft voiced in the forum, that things
have decayed beyond reform or redemption. To borrow a famous line from the
Vietnam era, though, it may be necessary to destroy the village to save it.
When Crowds Disperse…
Whatever
strategy evolves on the streets, the protestors have shown admirable
restraint so far, having done no worse than tie up Brooklyn Bridge traffic
for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It took 700 arrests to clear the
bridge, but we have a strong feeling that many more thousands of arrests will
be made before the protestors trudge home. The majority of them reportedly
are of college age, and it therefore seems likely that they will go all-out
to recapture the yearned-for activist spirit of the 1960s that they have only
read about or seen lovingly recreated in the movies. If so, the good news is
that the so-far shapeless protests have the potential to harness constructive
energy that might otherwise be squandered on such bogeymen as
“racism” and “homophobia.” The bad news is that, when
the crowds finally disperse, in all too many cases it will be to their
parents’ homes, there to contemplate employment prospects bleaker than
at any time since the Great Depression. This is undoubtedly a significant
contributor to their malaise, although the true state of the economy may be
even grimmer than they might imagine, assuming they get their economic news
from the likes of John Stewart and Rolling Stone magazine.
Our
prediction is that the protests, far from fizzling out in a few days, weeks
or even months, will attract bigger and bigger crowds from an inexhaustble army of online recruits, replacements and
budding young revolutionaries. A new Woodstock beckons, but we adults shouldn’t
be surprised if peace, love and music do not emerge thematically to temper
their behavior. To the contrary, because of the very serious problems that an
intractable recession has imposed on their young lives, there is every likelihood that the protests will turn ugly.
Rick Ackerman
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