Are the Occupy Wall Street protesters deserving of sympathy? I’m not totally sure about that, but their cause—if indeed they have one—is certainly worth a few words as this once-small group in New York City becomes something with a little more substance.
The movement, which had a substantial presence near the State Capitol Saturday, is many things: gregarious and growing to oversimplify. But my real issue, my source of discontent, is that despite all the fanfare, this occupation seems to be adrift.
I talked to a couple of people at the event in Raleigh this weekend, and they really couldn’t give me a compass for the discontent. The responses seemed to fall along those lines: people want jobs; the 99 percent is being held hostage by Wall Street; the government needs to do something.
In this context, the protests merely seem cacophonous. This isn’t to say I’m particularly coldhearted towards the cause of the unemployed and underemployed — if anything, I’ve been fairly sympathetic to our generation in this column. In this case, though, it sounds whiny.
The economic conditions ravishing this generation in the job markets aren’t definitively the fault of greedy bankers. It makes for a pretty picture, but if we’re going to cast blame on the top one percent of earners, it would be more logical to put the bankers into context within that population. Banking is the occupation of some of the country’s highest earners, and non-financial sector executives and CEOs make up the plurality of the top one percent.
However, if we’re being totally honest here, the top one percent of earners shouldn’t even be what bothers us about the economic landscape. The more troublesome thing for those of us who aren’t majority shareholders in a Fortune 500 corporation is the lack of growth in the middle. The median income for North Carolina families has risen during the last ten years, but not at the rate of the cost of living. That hurts you and me much more than a handful of people whose incomes have grown exponentially with corporate profits.
The more indefensible complaint to me, though, is the call for jobs. Whether many of us in the era of unemployment want to admit it or not, handouts aren’t the solution. A large part of the jobs gap we’re facing is due to a lack of entrepreneurship and self motivation on the part of the idle.
Employment is quite literally at most people’s fingertips if they seize the opportunity of their situation instead of wallowing in it. Your hands, whether they’re writing a novel or HTML, can be powerful tools of entrepreneurship and self impetus.
I guess that fundamental tenet is why I struggle to muster much sympathy for the protesters. I’m willing to bet most of them have access to the Internet and a whole host of other tools to access a global marketplace that will soon surpass 7 billion people.
Getting a job is first and foremost about selling yourself. If you don’t have the confidence to give it a go on, no one else is going to display confidence in you either.
It’s probably not a bad idea to try and occupy yourself for a change.
