On Saturday, October 15, I attended the Occupy St. Louis protest, one of the many demonstrations around the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. My first reaction was a kind of sadness, or d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. How many demonstrations had I, and others on the Left, been to over the years for progressive causes too numerous to mention? Despite all that effort, we have ended up in the dire economic, social and political crisis we are in today, the worst since the Great Depression.<\/p>\n
Was all that political activism pointless? Short answer, no. We can look back on solid achievements in civil rights, the peace movement, worker rights, and environmental and other social and economic causes. What happened? The Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations unleashed the floodgates of corporate money into government, which led to the Great Recession we are now experiencing. Corporate Democrats and Republicans gained ascendency, overwhelmed the forces of democracy by deregulating the financial industry, and managed to shred the social contract, all in the name of free market capitalism.<\/p>\n
Upon arrival at the Occupy St. Louis demonstration, I was disappointed at the turnout, maybe 1,000 at most. (The previous demonstration against corporate greed last spring had at least 4,000). The usual political types were present with their signs and literature, along with union leaders and groups of young college students. The split was interesting\u2014older aging hippies, veterans of more left political demonstrations than they care to remember, and the young who are more anarchistic in nature and feel comfortable with the spontaneous, leaderless, egalitarian quality of Occupy Wall Street. My friends and I spoke to some of the college kids who happened to be social work students. They were connecting the dots between the social problems they were training to address and the economic and political system that often creates them.<\/p>\n
Although the actual demonstrations around the country may be small, something is happening to the national psyche. The term \u201c99%\u201d is catching on, even among those who wouldn\u2019t be caught dead at a left leaning political protest. So, I think it is a mistake to measure the effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street by the numbers of protestors. They represent the tip of the iceberg, as did the much larger spontaneous demonstrations in Madison Wisconsin against the right wing takeover of the State by Governor Walker and his sponsors the Koch Brothers.<\/p>\n
Despite right wing efforts to label Occupy Wall Street (and the public sector union demonstrations in Madison) as dangerous and anti-American, the country is slowly awakening to the fact that the top 1% has hijacked our economy, our democracy and most importantly, our values. Collectively, we are awakening from the free market \u201cAmerican dream,\u201d that has turned into a national nightmare. There is no denying that we have been witnessing our economic and political system destroying itself thanks to the ascendency of conservative values in the past decades. George Lakoff defines conservative values as:<\/a><\/p>\n The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Occupy Wall Street offers the most hopeful and coherent argument against the conservative view to date, by directly challenging those on Wall Street who most embody the ideas and values that have led us to the Great Recession. It is especially hopeful because it represents a national, grassroots political awakening outside the mostly corrupt political party structure.<\/p>\n