Protests

I don't watch or read the news that much, so my information about the Occupy Wall Street and the spin-off/solidarity protests is mostly second-hand.  Here in Richmond we have a protest coming up in a few days.  Many of my friends are supporting the movement, if not actually participating, and I've felt some peer pressure to join in, but I have been reluctant to do so.  Reading a few comments on an online news story (why do only mean, ignorant Conservatives comment on online news stories?) made me want to run and join the protests, but it was a temporary effect.  It took me a while to put my finger on what bothers me about these protests.  The "99%" slogans don't appeal to me.  I've always been an anti-elitist (or a "reverse snob"), but never a populist.  Being part of a huge majority doesn't feel like something to aspire to or boast about, to me.  If they brought back "Eat the Rich" I might be more sympathetic.  But it goes beyond the slogan.  I find myself wondering, why now?  Who are these people who are just waking up to the inequalities of our systems, the lack of effective socioeconomic leveling mechanisms in our culture?  I guess they didn't care about it until it affected them personally.  Can they possibly be serious?  What do they want to happen?  

I don't believe our problems can be neatly blamed on the 1%.  The 99%, the collective majority of Americans, has a lot of culpability in the situation.  I'm not talking about individual debt, it goes much deeper than that.  Are the protesters making real changes in their lives, other than easy ones like moving their money from banks to credit unions?  I suspect the majority of them want reform, not revolution, and certainly not a radical change in their own lifestyles that would take power back from the CEO's and politicians in a meaningful way.  Being a leftist movement, I'm sure they want to transfer some power from corporations to government, which is not a goal worth fighting for in my opinion, any more than the Tea Party's effective goal of transferring power from government to corporations.

I am working, in my own life, to transfer power from both corporations and government to myself and other individuals.  I have a lot of room for improvement, but I am working hard to meet more and more of my family's needs by producing things myself, community-building, buying locally grown, buying handmade, buying used, buying from small family businesses, buying from socially and ecologically responsible companies, consuming less, transacting in cash, and avoiding taxes whenever possible.  These activities take time, energy and money, which I feel is better invested than it would be in political action, and pays better dividends.