'Occupy' types

[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.

[JoeRedskin]

Lotus - Unsurprisingly, I agree with you on all points. If I have intimated anything different it was simply my knee-jerk reaction to some other knee jerk reactions and I admit not particularly productive.

My initial observations (way back when) in this thread were simply that, unlike the Tea Party, the OWS'ers are not an effective populist movement at this time. BUT, as saden1 said and you have much more fully analyzed, this is just the start - so it is likely too early to judge in that regard. Perhaps in three years, the political landscape has been radically changed by someone or some group building off the tensions being brought to the fore by the OWS'ers.

For me, I absolutely agree with the OWS'ers that the Market is broken and needs to be fixed but, as I said initially, the devil is in the details and standing in the park doesn't provide the answers.