Mary Whitfill
By Features Editor
Although Coppell residents tend to be financially better off than other people across the globe, economies world wide have been suffering under the strain of a declining stock market and widening gap between the upper and lower economic classes. Occupy Wall Street, an international protest movement aimed at criticizing blatant classism, is quickly gaining ground as one of the most widely organized protests in history.
Less than two months from its New York City start in mid September, Occupy protests are ongoing
in over 95 cities and across 82 countries. Residents of countries including Germany, Italy, Malaysia and the United Kingdom have begun following in the footsteps of American protestors, but as the Occupy protests continue to spread across the globe, demonstrations here at home have begun to lose the vigor of the original movement.
I will always be a supporter of direct action as means of achieving a righteous end, but as the Occupy protests continue I find myself supporting the movement less and less. My problem with Occupy is that they aren’t doing anything, really.
The movements were impressive at first because they were well organized, but now it just seems like a bunch of kids camping in parks. I appreciate the idea of a revolution, but Occupy has lost the purpose of a protest. A protest has a desired result; a protest has a foreseeable end.
Another big problem I have is this: I understand the 99 percent and one percent comparison, but those people in the midst of most of the Occupy protests aren’t like anyone I’ve grown up with.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have loved to protest classism over the years, but they had to work so they could survive. They couldn’t sit in a park for three weeks and post messages to Facebook. If true protestors want to make a splash, they have to get out of the parks and their little Sim City communities and make something happen.
In addition, these protests have been littered with Guy Fawkes masks because participants have seen V for Vendetta too many times. It makes people on the outside wonder what people are aiming for and what tactics they will resort to if they have to wear the mask of someone who was ultimately sentenced to death for treason. We don’t celebrate the American Taliban kid, so we shouldn’t celebrate Guy Fawkes – it is not our history and it is not how we solve this problem.
The Occupy protests have a cause that many people (including me) agree with, but they don’t know what they are aiming for. Politics isn’t the problem – politics is the system that has to be used to solve the problem.
The solution is political and while people may hate this, we have to work within the system, or our country is no longer a country. If the ultimate goal is a renewed system, the first step is changing the people that run the system, something that can only by achieved through politics.
These young revolutionaries can spend all the time they want occupying Wall Street, but until a governmental change is made, nothing will ever happen. Stop sitting in Central Park and sit on Capital Hill. If this is something that is truly to change, it is a shift in power that will do it, not a shift in location of the unemployed.
