OWS

Matt Taibbi starts this piece with this: I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

I had no such problem. As a matter of fact, as anyone who knows me will tell you,  I have been screaming most of this from the rooftops for many years now. Often times to the detriment of my personal and professional life.  When I saw that there were millions of others popping up all around the country  it gave me one of the best feelings I ever experienced.  
While Matt may not have understood at the beginning he gets it now and wrote an excellent piece that you can read in its entirety here.  Here's the gist of the matter:


This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left. The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me....trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes.
..modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money.

..We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something.
...People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes.  

Its not 1953 anymore and this isn't the land of opportunity where hard work always pays off. It's now luck and cronyism that are the linchpins to success.Why is George Clooney, just as an example, fabulously rich and people that work just as hard and as many hours are not? Why is it that CEOs are worth 2 to 4 hundred times the pay of the median worker in his company? And that ratio has been rising for 30 years with no sign of abatement. No ,you cant have all there is, there's others here too, and many of us are sick of a system that depletes our national resources and makes us debt slaves to our corporate masters just to survive.
Many probably have a far different perspective on the reality of the world in which we live. Fine you go on and have it. I've watched this all my life and no wingnut rationality is going to move me to drop what I see to be real in my own experience. Thats what many on the right that want to continue to debate this dont seem to get. My days of debting the right are done. They don't express the reality of the dream of the world I seek or have found in my everyday life.