You're Listening, But Are You Hearing?

Stop talking about a so-called lack of definition muddling the Occupy Wall Street message. These protesters, who purportedly make up nine and nine-tenths of every 10 Americans, are not a band of kidnappers. They do not come with a list of demands stitched together from magazine cutouts.

Do you really expect a concise mission statement from a vastly aggrieved collection of people frustrated by a culture of institutional inequity? Even if they could compose one, they don’t even have a megaphone to voice it.

I understand the purpose of the movement is blurry through the mainstream media lens. Truly, it is. But then, maybe that’s the point.

“Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message,” stated Dahlia Lithwick in a recent Slate article. “It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists.”

It’s all too weighty to be a sweet sound bite, Brian Williams.

Ken Krayeske, a 2010 Green Party candidate for Connecticut’s First District, scolded me when I asked if the overall impreciseness hurts the movement. As he sees it if the whole thing was pared down to a three-word catchphrase fit for a bumper sticker, “Tax the Rich” perhaps, it would hinder a long overdue conversation about the perils of unfettered and deregulated capitalism.

 “I think it’s great,” said Mr. Krayeske about the Occupy Wall Street approach. “They are forcing us to have a discussion.”

If still confounded, consider this. The protests born out of a modest park in Lower Manhattan in September went global within weeks not because of some indiscriminate butterfly effect, but because it resonates with a very clear and relatable theme: economic justice.

That’s a subjective term, for sure, when I strolled through Zuccotti Park earlier this month I soon learned the myriad ways people see economic justice. They may not define uniformly, but everybody defines it. Regardless the placard, nobody was off-message. In New York City and Oakland and Danbury there’s a newfound Constitutional Convention.

Union champion Paul Armstrong, in from Los Angeles with a hard hat and everything, saw the lack of jobs in 9-percent-unemployed America as the foundation of our problems. On the opposite side of the park, Democratic presidential candidate Harry Braun gave an exhaustive presentation on the possibility of solar hydrogen energy, the jobs it would mean.

The young man that held the “Healthcare, Not Warfare” sign likely understands that the price of privatized medicine is inversely proportionate when compared to personal wealth. Rich people enjoy inexpensive, quality healthcare, poor people get sick and go bankrupt.

The gentleman holding the sign “New Laissez-Faire: Hoarding the Profits, Socializing the Risk” was clearly making a statement about bailing out corrupt financial institutions on the backs of American taxpayers. How Christian we are, to help out those far more fortunate.  

Can anybody sum up the Tea Party in three words or fewer? If it is about citizens frustrated with an overspending congress, please explain the fervor illustrated in placards over illegal immigration and gun rights?

Yet rambling as it is the Tea Party proved powerfully persuasive, enough so to effect change in the 2010 elections and restore some semblance of balance to government. As the 99 percent has gone international in recent weeks, it would be foolish to think Occupy Wall Street won’t have impact felt in November 2012.

Then we’ll all know what they’re talking about.