[Lotus]

Personally I have disagreements with some posters on both sides of this issue.

I know several people who are involved in the Occupy movement. They are intelligent non-hippie people with good jobs and they are not violent. Therefore they defy the stereotypes which are so common in this thread. Instead, they are educated and good-hearted Americans manifesting the same frustration with the rapaciousness of the unregulated rich which drove some of the policies of Teddy Roosevelt. And they are expressing this frustration in an authentic American way. So if you are one of those people in this thread who stereotype Occupy protesters as shiftless and/or violent hippies, you are not understanding the movement in a clear way.

All that said, That Guy and Hooskins are correct. While I admire the utopian ideals of the Occupy movement, their utopianism has prevented them from enunciating discrete, specific goals and discrete, specific paths for realizing those goals. This lack of direction, it seems to me, keeps the Occupy movement as it currently exists from achieving any real change.

Because the frustration which drives the movement will not evaporate even if their movement achieves nothing, the social energy of the movement will not disappear. Instead it will transform into something new with the same themes. In the years to come I think we will see similar social movements which are more focused and directed and thus more productive. American history has shown that you can't keep a populist spirit down too long. If we do not understand this, and instead we stereotype embodiments of this spirit as hippie thugs, we will be unable to cope with the inevitable progression of history.