It wouldn't surprise me if 99% of the "occupy(fill in the blank)", well, if their parents come from the 1% they rail against. The Occupy Boston crowd just has "trust fund babies" written on so many of their faces.
Same as it ever was...
This is from an outside observer, so bear that in mind. It seems to me that the accusation of "trust-fund" babies is what the conservative political machine is using to divert attention from the message, namely wealth inequality - something it's just not cool to talk about in this country. The machine is also doing this by focusing on posters which seem to bear no relation to Wall Street, e.g., 'Save the Whales!' in order to imply that the people are just a disorganized bunch of wanna-be hippies. The funny thing is that this protest caught the conservative machine totally by surprise. They had to use the standard canned responses to play catch-up. Of course, the right-moderate poolitical (a typo, but I like it) machine is happy to let them fumble around because a focus on wealth inequality is not what they want, either - no matter how tarred they are with the 'socialist' brush.
Of course, this was the country whose revolution did away with titles and nobility - but now, whose social mobility lags far behind 'Olde Europe,' and whose wealth inequality is eerily reminiscent of the Gilded Age. "Buy American" has long ceased to be possible or even desirable. What we were told was the dawning of the Great Age of the Service Economy is moving overseas, too. I suspect many of the OWS crowd are college graduates who can find only unemployment, rather than jobs. Don't even go there, because the truth is that even McDonalds can be picky in this economy, and often, they prefer older workers who can't afford to retire. Welcome to Wal-Mart. Even those jobs which were supposed to be recession-proof, like nursing, are experiencing hiring freezes and lay-offs (well, as fewer people have employer-provided health insurance since they don't have a job...you do the math). I suppose they could go pick the fruit of the fields, but oh yeah, the drought/floods (depending on your location) destroyed most of the crops this year - and the Bread Basket of the World is well on its way to becoming a net importer of food, anyway. When I ask Americans about the realities of their situation, Conservative or Liberal, the response is something like, "Nuh-uh!"
Perhaps it is as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, when trying to get college students to
think about what they are being told (or not told) and why:
The press can both stimulate public opinion and miseducate[sic] it...The press has become the greatest power within the Western Countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
