Screw the Protests

or

Blech! My Coffee Tastes Like Sewage!

I've been considering the protests on Wall Street and around the country for a while now. In fact, I've been considering them before they happened. They way I see it, it was inevitable. You can't have this amount of hardship rubbing up against privilege without causing a bit of chaffing.
I won't talk about numbers, percents or dollar amounts. The people who may be moved by those things already know them; the rest won't be swayed or don't care. After all, this is really an emotional issue. It's true that many will say that this corporate greed needs to stop, that the pandering from the politicians has reached a point where it is destructive, but at the end of the day, week, year, none of this will dramatically change.
This Occupy Wall Street bullshit has been compared to the peace movements of the sixties. Martin Luther King has been invoked and is probably twisting in his grave. See, that man had style. He had God on his side and, above all, he had an obtainable goal. Equal rights is doable. Legislated fairness with regards to race is doable.
Even the hippies smoking dope out in the open in the streets and fields and college campuses had a conceivably reachable goal to strive for and demonstrate against. Did they try to get their lifestyles legitimized? You know that live free and FUCK THE MAN! mentality? Sure, but only their fight against the war really worked.
Now, why did those two agendas succeed while this current moanfest will fail? It's for a few simple reasons, really.
1) There's no real leadership. There's no well-spoken individual putting a face on this mess and making it dignified. There were a lot of people who hated King for what he was doing, but he brought a sense of necessity to the issue and he made it everyone's problem. I like to think there was some racist asshole watching his fuzzy black-and-white with a shotgun in his lap while MLK gave his "I have a dream!" speech. I imagine his eyes welling up a little. I have him steel himself back up with a swig of moonshine from a jar on aluminum tv tray next to his lounge chair and he says to the hound at his feet, "You know what, Cooner? That fella's gotta point."
I don't have cable but I hear plenty on the radio and I have a computer. Currently, I get bits and pieces of the vilification of the protesters on one side and an attempt to humanize them on the other side. This isn't really about the issue; it's about the presentation.
2) The clashes with police in the sixties had a bunch of people's kids getting sprayed with fire-hoses, beaten, bitten and hogtied. The kids may have been dressed funny, under the influence and surrounded by questionable acquaintances, true, but they were still the children of mothers and fathers who believed their children would grow up one day and return to a civilized society, preferably without a cracked skull. These days, supporters are compelled to create sympathy. If 99% (oops) of the US population is presented, why must they explain? It's because many of that 99% don't consider themselves as a part of this current body politic.
3) They had clear objectives: Civil Rights and get out of the war (with a distinct underlining socialist bent that was more negotiable than the other two). So what do today's protesters really want? I empathize with the desire for a sense of equality, that whole "fair share" bit. I am aware of all the numbers dealing with wealth distribution, the discrepancies in income increases over the past several decades, the political influence and the myriad issues concerning our financial institutions and the government.
Even so, I ask again, what do they want? Those on Wall Street aren't going to do anything about it. The rich who understand or care about these grievances (Hello, Warren Buffet) can't change the system with op-eds and they're outnumbered by their peers anyway. There's been a movement to support their beliefs called Patriotic Millionaires For Fiscal Strength that I'm willing to bet few people have even heard of much less seen any effect and that is from a volunteering group.
4) They created a true disruption. Schools were closed down. The Mall was filled. Fields were taken over and made into public toilets. Today, they bargain with mayors to allow them to stay in designated parks. If you look around the world right now, you won't find the Greeks being polite, and those are some people in trouble.
5) Lastly, there was a real sense of violence along with the peaceful demonstrations. As a contrast to Martin Luther King, there were people like H. Rap Brown saying, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down." Additionally, Weathermen were blowing up statues, banks and government buildings. When given the choice between working with MLK and a bunch of hippies or Malcolm X and radicals openly intent on the violent overthrow of capitalism, the authorities played ball with the former.
There's no real sense of danger from an aspect of the movement today and no standout, rationally presentable leadership from another aspect and therefore no one to choose between.
I am not an advocate of outright violence and I think threats are transparent and weak. I also don't like socialism, but I don't find taxes to be socialism. What I find socialist is the seizure of property. When we start taking people's extra houses and cars and clothes, I'll worry. Taxing the wealthy and leaving them with only ten, twenty or a hundred times more than the average American wage doesn't bother me in the least.
That being said, I think there is another problem with this "movement". Who's their target? It's not really Wall Street. I know that phrase refers to the people running Wall Street but that term is as ambiguous and vague as Main Street. (And I might add, it has a hint of the "they" stink of so many conspiracy theorists). It's not really the rich, either. Many of us aspire to gain wealth for ourselves and our families. It's part of the American Dream. We don't actually begrudge the rich for their wealth; the problem is the manner in which many have gained their wealth and how they maintain it.
The protesters are peacefully focused on the wrong establishments.
This leads us to the true perpetrators of this issue: the legislators. Only they can affect the change that will ultimately fix the situation. It has to be about policy, not culture, because there's no incentive for the rich to change and they shouldn't need to do so.
But guess what? This is the first truly bipartisan, or at least left-right intersection, we've seen in several years. Many of the same grievances are mentioned from each camp. (Check out James Sinclair's post, Occupy Wall Street vs. The Tea Party. It's a well written consideration that even has a nice simplified venn diagram included. Another commentator I've had the fortune of reading several posts from is Paul Krugman at the NY Times.)
With this commonality, the protesters should march all over DC. They should camp out at Cantor and Boehner's homes. They should block every member of congress, Democrat and Republican alike, from leaving work for fear that they might be handily attacked or hit by a projectile - one that is preferably hard and wrapped in foreclosure notices. Let their appointments as legislators come with the price of duty and responsibility rather than the reward of power and prestige.
A recent poll showed Herman Cain leading President Obama in a head-to-head. His bullshit 9-9-9 plan, a completely unpassable proposal by the way, appeals to many who believe it to be a fair way of handling our fiscal problems. (I won't extemporize on this much other than to say that the only way I would ever support a flat tax is if it were shackled to a progressive cost of living plan also. In that I mean food, energy and healthcare costs are also based on a percentage of income, that way the poor wouldn't spend a greater portion of their income on survival than what the rich spend. This would still allow for wealth accumulation and purchases of privilege without burdening those less fortunate.) However, it does have something that the current demagogues don't: intention to change the system.
Despite record-low approval ratings of congress, they insist on staying on this current track. Despite the majority approving the basic content of President Obama's Jobs Plan, congress is not pushing it forward. Despite that the #1 concern of the majority of Americans is job creation, they debate - or rather, pointedly refuse to debate - taxes and abortion.
Why is this? Well, it's the same reason why dogs lick their own balls, because they can. They feel no sense of threat from the populace, they've shown that so many times it's become a joke. Neither are they faced with someone to whom they must directly answer. Sure we say, they must answer to the people. Has anyone else noticed how little effect this has? The faceless mob of protesters is either of little consequence or irrelevant.
The livelihoods of these political kings and queens are secure and even if many, though not all, of them never earn another cent, they will come out of this alright. They expect the protesters to fatigue. They believe that our current Starbucks culture will return to its previous indignant and ineffective self. The economy will stabilize at some point, when exactly, they don't care, and they expect the self-proclaimed 99% to again indulge themselves in buying products and lattes, yumm!, to obfuscate their discomfort of knowing something isn't right. As for the legislators, they will remain steadfast and continue to operate as they have always done: for those who provide them with the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed.
Enjoy the Show!