Olorinus wrote:
I think it is fair game to question your roomate's self-interested motives for latching on to the occupy movement/their ideology. Perhaps for her, it represents a codification of her abdication of responsibility.
Honestly, if that is the case, she doesn't really get it (at least from my perspective). The fact is, what the core of the movement appears to be trying to do is to create a new dialogue about democracy and the values of our society. Truly participating in such an "occupation" would actually be a lot of work. And honestly, people who have to work (within the system) to scrape by actually might be the least able to participate in such an excercise.
But doesn't that make the message (and certainly the messengers) a bit dishonest? How much weight should we put on a group of people complaining about wall street and bank bailouts, when they are by far the least (negatively) impacted by those things in the first place? How can you complain about "our money" being used to bail out wall street, when you haven't paid taxes (and that's ignoring the whole "TARP money to banks paid back in full with interest bit)?
While I can accept that there are some legitimate complaints to be made (from many directions), the main face of the Occupy movement seems to be young people with minimal work/life experience, basically showing up to demand a free ride and pretending that somehow the fact that other people's tax dollars were spent in ways that they don't like gives them the justification to make said demand. Meanwhile, most of the people who actually work and pay taxes seem to understand the issue better and aren't jumping into the Occupy bandwagon.
On an amusing side note, when I first read that (especially the bolded section), it reminded me of the Hippy movement and how most of the communes failed. What happened in many cases was that about 10-20% of those in the communes actually wanted them to succeed and realized that hard work was involved. Real hard work. Like digging irrigation ditches, planting crops, building and repairing homes, etc. The other 80-90% wanted to live in a "free society" in which everyone shared everything. And they came up with all sorts of justification as to how their work making crafts, and singing songs, and thinking/talking about how wonderful their society could/should be, was just as valuable to the commune as any other work. Meanwhile, they "shared" the food at the table, and the water from the dug and maintained well, and thought everything was wonderful and perfect.
What inevitably happened was that the folks who were actually working in productive ways either took control of the commune and imposed some rules to make sure everyone was pulling their weight, or, failing that, left in disgust. Which resulted in communes that either became as authoritarian (or moreso) than the world they'd left or which collapsed due to the simple fact that you can only support so many people selling flowers and songs on the side of the road.
Not sure what reminded me of that, but it did. I suspect that many of those young kids at those protests are like the people in the communes who thought a perfect society was one in which everything was "free". But someone has to work and pay for those things, right? I don't think many of them really understand that. That's the impression I get from this movement. As you said, an abdication of responsibility. And I while I'm sure there's a small number of people who want to take a more responsible approach, they, like the hard workers in the commune are inevitably outnumbered by those who leap upon such movements thinking it'll be a free ride.
The abdicators may not be the "core", but they are the majority.