Editor's Note | 9/20

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Sep 20, 2011

I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon and there are currently thousands, according to most not obviously-exaggerated estimates, of people camped out on Wall Street in New York City as part of a protest that started on Saturday, organized in part by anti-consumerist publication Adbusters and in part by Anonymous, the hacker group known for taking down websites restricting personal freedoms and taking themselves too seriously. Dubbed “Occupy Wall Street,” the protest is billed as an indefinite sit-in meant to mirror the Tahrir Square protests that were so effective in Egypt.

According to the Adbusters blog, there is a simple goal: “We demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.” So the rhetoric on Wall Street this weekend is ripe with talk of “the other 98 percent” and “corporate greed” and signs insisting things like “no war but class war.” Essentially, protesters are fighting for the dying middle class.

Long term, organizers have called for 20,000 protesters to peacefully flood Wall Street and stay there for about two months, creating a tent city and effectively shutting down the financial district. Ideally, according to Adbusters and the Occupy Wall Street website, the protest would grow from New York and spread to cities all over the United States. Alas, estimates from the weekend have been, underwhelmingly, somewhere between one and five thousand attendees.

Last spring, in this same space, I ruminated on the idea of nation-wide protest of a similar kind and whether or not it would work. We’ll finally see.

But some things appear to be amok. Google “occupy wall street” and choose the news filter. On the first page, no major media outlets have had any kind of coverage about it aside from non-U.S. based Al Jazeera.

Maybe it’s because these protests are really not that big of a deal. Maybe it only deserves blog coverage because the event has been a massive batch of uninspiring mediocrity. I completely allow that possibility.

The other, more frightening possibility is that media outlets are ignoring the protest or refusing coverage. Rumors circulated this weekend that, while police and protesters cooperated, journalists and camera crews were deterred by the police officers.

The cause is noble but the circumstances just might not be right at this time: the United States is spread out. Similar protests that have been effective recently mostly took place in countries with a land mass smaller than Texas. Media is barely covering the event so word is spreading at a near stagnant rate. And to most of the middle class, it’s more important that they keep a low-paying job than leave it to go protest a tax distribution they see as grossly unfair. Understandable; I’m still here working and going to school instead of camping out on Wall Street, too.

But no doubt the United States is in need of change on a revolutionary scale. So if this doesn’t work now, when will it? Maybe never? So my support goes to those occupying Wall Street. Things can’t happen if no one does them.