The Path to Protest

What better way to hide under a veil of dogmatism then to disregard large-scale protests as the whining of naive young people?

On their editorial page, the Wall Street Journal refers to the Occupy Wall Street movement as a “collection of ne’er-do-wells raging against Wall Street, or something.”

Since Sept. 17, a growing coalition of unemployed college graduates, out-of-luck youth and activists have occupied Manhattan’s financial district.

Although criticized for a lack of a singularly coherent message, the refusal to do so is to refuse the very validation of the corrupt system they are opposing.

And this by no means takes anything away from the significance of their cause.

Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are students and young adults who have made Zuccotti Park their headquarters.

Every day more defiant youths, who refuse to be subsumed under the corrupt status quo of an irresponsible financial sector, rally to the park.

Personally, I’m behind the protesters and the exasperation they are expressing.

As students, our futures have been mortgaged away, and not by any means to the highest bidder, but to the bidder with the most “credit.”

We did everything right, after all.

We went to college, worked hard and yet after graduation we can merely stare gawk-eyed and helpless at our foreordained situation: an inexcusable mound of debt with no job or future to appease the pain.

The banks had foreclosed on all our futures long before 2008.

They got the money and we got a bleak future.

America’s naive experiment failed. We shooed our fully functional and economically superior Keynesian system out the door for a “pure” market experiment. We raised the leverage ceiling, turned the other cheek when derivatives were introduced and didn’t even bother with credit default swaps.

We once thought the markets would regulate themselves, that private sectors, once deregulated, would practice restraint and sound common sense.

At least that’s the excuse for the systematic policy of deregulation that our government jauntily awarded the financial sector, a policy which has thrust the country into a dire recession.

But you don’t have to know what CDOs, leverage and credit default swaps are in order to feel financial frustration.

The indignance being displayed now by the Occupy Wall Street protesters is justified not by their economic literacy but by the sentiments they share with many Americans.

Every step the protesters take reflects the repressed frustration of a nation of youth who have to scrounge through a circumstance unfairly thrust upon them by flagrant recklessness.

Something was wrong, the system failed and now the spirit of indifference is finally being challenged again in the public forum.

It’s easy to shoo the ever-increasing protesters aside as naive or uninformed of the facts ““ but does that really matter?

Does it matter if they don’t know that after leverage was deregulated in 2004, banks were allowed to borrow absurd amounts of money? Or that during the credit bubble some of the major firms on wall street had a credit to actual dollar ratio of 30 to 1?

No, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is our dire situation today, the facts of which are undisputable. Facts that, not just students, but everyone can experience firsthand.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are capturing that experience and holding it high for everyone to see. The economy isn’t a trampoline and it won’t bounce back to where it was for a long time, but there is hope.

It is a mistake to write off the movement as insignificant so quickly before measuring its success. It could have the potential to represent and inspire people with similar frustrations.

Do you sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Email Dafter at

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