The Occupy Wall Street movement is now in the middle of its second month. It has inspired similar movements across the country, all of which seem just as committed to the cause as the core group in New York. And even as the temperature dips, the protests grow.
What they haven’t done, though, is take any meaningful steps toward being a viable movement for changing anything.
It’s still just aimless, unwashed masses, milling about in the street and holding up cardboard signs that decry the evils of greed, corruption and corporations. They wail about how “evil businessmen have so much money but don’t help anyone with it!” They fulminate against unclear figures and universal vices.
But still, they have no idea how to stop those evils. There is a stunning lack of original or constructive thinking. Without that, not much is going to be done.
On top of that, they continue to decry the very notion of leadership. Because America’s form of democracy has led to the unbounded corporate theft of today, they view the only solution as having vague branches of representation — a press branch, a fundraising branch, etc. — in which everyone is supposed to have a voice.
Direct democracy has never worked for a simple reason: with anything more than a handful of people, it becomes impossible, or at least insanely time consuming, to accomplish anything. And when you’re dealing with a time-bound decision, that could make the difference between life and death.
The direction the OWS movement must move in, if it hopes to accomplish anything, is obvious. It must select a group of people, or multiple groups of people, to head different branches of their group.
In lieu of any sort of sophisticated voting system, those people will have to make decisions without the consent of the entire OWS movement. And then the movement is right back where it started: a select group making decisions that either favor them or don’t favor everyone in the group as much as they’d like.
Such an air of absolute naivety surrounds the movement that I wonder if they have any idea whatsoever where to go or what to do. No one really seems to know if they do, either, and it’s not for lack of trying. Journalists have gone onto the streets the protesters are occupying and tried to get to know them, to find leaders, some coherent message.
But there’s been no luck.
There are clearly newspapers and publications who stand behind the movement. A lot of celebrities do; a lot of important people do. But they haven’t been able to change or motivate OWS more than the next guy, because the movement is so blindly against any sort of direction. Stephen Colbert came the closest out of anyone I’ve seen to finding leaders, or at least representatives. Their interview can be seen on his website.
It’s not hard to find a model of what OWS should be doing. Look to Elizabeth Warren. She created the Consumer Protection Bureau, designed to stop those evil, greedy corporations OWS decried. Of course, it lost much potency because Washington is Washington, but the point remains: she recognized that to change the system, you don’t stand outside holding up cardboard signs and sleeping in tents. You work inside the system and you actually try to accomplish something.