to begin, it is clear that your
deeply held dedication to the art
of reportage, the respect with
which you view journalism and
those dedicated practitioners
who came before you, would simply not let you turn away from
the opportunity that the current
of events had thrust before you.
so, much as the storied news
gatherers who preceded you had
braved the front lines at okinawa,
the deadly morass of the vietnamese jungles, the front lines
of afghanistan, and the deadly
outlying areas of Iraq, you too
put personal safety aside and got ‘in’ , in
amongst the rabble and dangerous subversives who comprise the ‘occupy Wall
street’ mass(ing?) protest. edward r. Murrow salutes you, sir!
You showed them all, with an in depth
analysis of the the ‘occupy Wall street’
mass protest (and barbeque). the only
problem is you came, you saw, and you
went away with nothing.
In the write up of your ‘investigation’
you report that most of the protesters have
little or none of the type of knowledge that
you, your peers, and your (assumed) reading audience would respect. You wrote:
“they seemed almost universally undereducated in terms of the specifics of the
financial services industry they wished
to protest, and not one could explain, for
example, how exactly aIG imploded or
what the dodd-Frank act sought to accomplish.” as a means of pointing out the
protester’s collective intellectual shortcomings, and as a means of dismissing
them entirely.
despite your casual dismissal of the
protestors, their lack of leadership, focus,
or their inability to cite the dodd-Frank
act chapter and verse, your attempt to
understand them failed miserably. Your
disregard for their intellectual capaci-ties caused you to miss the main point,
which is, people are fed up. their true
feelings are metastasizing and the fed up
is turning to anger. they are angry and
while they may not be able to articulate
it in words that you ‘intelligent people’
can respect, the average person, formerly
of the ‘middle class’ , now better known
as the ‘working poor’ can perceive the
inherent injustice in a system which has
developed around them. so, let me try to
inform you of the phenomena occurring
before you, the message that you failed to
get, despite your efforts to go inside and
gain insight.
the protesters can’t say yet what they
can sense. First, they sense that they had
no say in the system that we live under
today. second, they sense that it is the
wealthy who control the system and that it
is rigged against them. they see reports of
Ceos making not 10 or 20 times the wage
of the average worker but 200 to 300 times
the amount of the average wage earner
and they sense the unfairness of it all.
they see the republican party telling the
american people that the wealthy are job
creators, a special class not to be taxed, but
they don’t see the jobs being created. that
makes them angry and even if they can’t
speak of it to your standards you better
believe that anger is real.
they do more than sense it, they directly feel it when they lose their homes,
or when forced to make daily decisions
of whether to buy food or medicine, or
when so many people that they know are
unemployed, having no real hope of finding a job. they also feel frustration when
they see politicians on tv playing political
games to benefit party affiliations rather
than acting to ease the country’s economic
woes, and so though the republican’s are
by far the worse of the two political parties they also sense that it doesn’t seem to
matter which party it is, because both are
playing political games while this
country sinks, and even worse,
both parties are so obviously
bought and paid for.
so now there is this nascent
movement that seems to you, an
‘intelligent person’ , so easy to dis-
miss. ‘Intelligent people’ like you
want to laugh at the stupid pro-
testors and their misspelled signs.
Laugh while the anger that’s been
growing for the past two years be-
gins to accelerate and take shape.
For two years the main feeling
in this country has been despair.
that feeling is beginning to turn
into anger. the transformation will hap-
pen in a flash and you will be surprised.
Most likely you and your ‘intelligent’ , mon-
eyed friends will still be dismissing the
protestor’s right up to the day that they
reach your doorstep.
there is a palpable feeling that a move-
ment is beginning to grow in this country.
as I write this, the New York Times is
featuring an article which reports that the
Wall street protests are already spread-
ing to other cities here in the us. Your
dismissal will give you little comfort when
they come for you and yours. I mean no
individual threat, please don’t misunder-
stand me. I’m simply warning you that a
mighty wind has begun to blow. It starts
as a small breeze but like the hurricane
that hit the northeast this summer it is just
beginning to blow. at first, softly, but in a
relatively short time the beginnings of gale
storm winds. soon it will be a measurable
thing, like that hurricane, visibly formed
and with an identifiable eye, signs of an
imminent storm.
as bob dylan sang in another time of
protest: “the answer my friend is blow-in’ in the wind”. He knew then what you
will soon learn my hearing and sight impaired friend, do not dismiss what you
can’t understand for “the times they are
a Changing”. the protesters won’t need
to be eloquent, be able to deliver a policy speech, or understand dodd-Frank. I
promise that when times do change, the
message will be clear and understandable
to all.
Lewis Urivetzky
