[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img]I’ve been keeping a cursory eye on the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere else movements. The main gripe, I gather, is that a lot of folks are upset that corporations, financial titans and their lobbyists only are looking out for the wealthiest one percent. Everyone else in the remaining ninety-nine percent be damned.
What the have-not protestors want, it seems, is a little consideration from the haves. I find this ironic given that my experience of this lovely ninety-nine percent is that they are generally inconsiderate themselves.
Consider my life in the not-so-rarified air of Los Angeles. I can’t think of anywhere I can go where someone isn’t shouting into a cell phone. That woman blocking an entire aisle of Trader Joe’s to make sure she got that complex email address right from her invisible caller wasn’t thinking of others. The woman who almost plowed into my car last week while talking and texting and missing that bright red octagonal stop sign, surely wasn’t thinking of others. The woman who didn’t see me and boldly cut in line at the grocery store, or gas station, surely wasn’t thinking of others. Those lovely neighbors whose many dogs, bark and bark and bark – can’t be thinking that someone else may want to enjoy a quiet phone call, or write, or sleep unmolested.
So these very people who will, at a moment’s notice, complain about the greed of Wall Street don’t seem to realize that the very behavior they complain of is no more than an outsized version of their own. Had the banks not stopped lending money to buffer these folks along such that they could continue to pretend to be solidly middle-class, I suspect you wouldn’t ever have heard a peep from them.
Why should your “average” banker give two hoots about others? We live in a country that glorifies riches. We staunchly believe in a winner-take-all type of capitalism and a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism. There have been countless Oprah shows that feature these very types of guests with her showing fawning, wide-eyed amazement at every get-rich-quick CEO to come down the pike. And the glut of reality shows featuring rich ne’er-do-wells seems to increase exponentially every season despite Americans’ supposed disgust.
Tell Me What the Difference Is?
The little folks are thrilled to say they have their own house, car, smart phone or big screen television they don’t have to share with others. Why pay taxes for things like parks or other shared commodities when everyone could or should have her or his own. How is that different than the hedge fund manager who has the fifteen million dollar paycheck and personalized tax break that he doesn’t have to share with anyone?
It’s not as if the Wall Streeters have done anything illegal. Even our President recently said so to defend his administration’s anti-prosecution stance when it comes to possible financial crimes.
Given the same set of circumstances and opportunities to legally grab other people’s money, most of us would have done it, myself included.
What I haven’t yet figured out is why the Occupy Wall Street movement isn’t the Occupy Washington (D.C.) movement. In one city, there lie all the people who have created and fostered the atmosphere that led to the Greed is Good generation.
Rollback of Glass-Steagall happened in Washington. Bailout of bankers happened right there in the good ‘ol District of Columbia. Those representatives who never communicate with constituents other than by form letter, I hear they go to Washington for many months of the year.
Those are the people for whom consideration of others is their job in this representative democracy of ours. But the ire of the OWS folks is not aimed at them.
Getting Their Attention
If protestors could get by the crushing force our police state calls “security,” I’m sure representatives couldn’t ignore them. I’d love to see people camped out at the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., or taking up residence in Howard Berman’s office. If lobbyists get the day, then the protestors could have the remaining hours. Would that kind of protest not be far more effective? Would it not reveal the wolves in sheep’s clothing?
I don’t expect much change by way of Wall Street in our bootstrapping, autonomous society. I expect even less from the rank-and-file Americans who horde what goodies they have, telling others to get their own. I expect nothing from a President who surrounds himself with bankers and former bankers – treating them like the smartest guys in the room. I think the only real change can come from those who have the power to make that change – all four hundred and thirty-five of them, and those who elect them.
Finally, Michelle Bachman and I agree on something – any protest of our current system should be within shouting distance of the White House. Get the to Washington, you Zuccotti Park campers you.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
