I’ll try to be gentle here, because I think their anger is both real and valid, but I think the folks at Occupy Wall Street are a misdirected bunch. Furthermore, I think their self-comparisons with the activists involved in the Arab Spring are way misdirected. To address the tip of that iceberg, getting maced by an overly zealous New York cop is nowhere near comparable to even one night in an Egyptian prison. Let your imagination run where it will and I betcha it won’t get close to the imagination of the Egyptian secret service. Who are, by the way, still around. But that’s another story.
The story today is about another group of individuals, mostly still around, who screwed the pooch when it comes to the economy. That group is, of course, generally known as “Wall Street” and I would bet that the people in positions to make real decisions in that rarefied air number fewer than students at my old school. (That number being less than 500, or at least that was the number when I was a student. That number has since doubled. Another story for another time.) What I think the Occupy Wall Street folks misunderstand is the motivation of “Wall Street.” There is this assumption that Wall Street knew what it was doing and intentionally screwed the rest of us.
Oh were that it were so. One might want to consider the scarier hypothesis that through both unwilling and willful ignorance, people in positions to make decisions on Wall Street have a tenuous, at best, idea of the impact of their decisions and the context necessary to make those decisions. Yes, it’s complex, blah, blah, blah. As the system has grown increasingly complex (and able to handle the financing necessary to bring you, among other things, social media and smart phones) this small club known as Wall Street has had to rely less on actual knowledge of the underlying investments and more on trust in the people advising and trading with them.
And that trust got shot to hell in 2008 resulting in a cataclysm of evaporating credit and a good hard look at the underlying investments. Which were not as good as their proponents had claimed. Which comes as no surprise to most members of the generation currently one rung down from the club level on Wall Street. Frankly, we have known since “Born in the USA,” or at least since Douglas Coupland’s Generation X that it was unlikely that our standard of living would exceed or even equal that of our parents. Frankly it just wasn’t sustainable.
But not everybody got the memo, and the kids occupying Wall Street are pissed at Wall Street for the betrayal of trust which was perpetrated in the markets. But the kids’ mistake is thinking that the illusion of a more prosperous tomorrow died with Lehman Brothers when it in fact died with American Motors. If that is true, then what do we do now? Instead of occupying Wall Street, we might try occupying Main Street. Put some energy into starting businesses in our own communities in order to trade with people we know and trust.
Hell, start a bank. Start a stock market or a venture capital fund. Seriously, these are just legal structures and you can’t swing a dead cat in this economy and not hit an unemployed lawyer. If that’s not your thing, start an artist’s cooperative or a community garden or a soup kitchen or a food pantry. It’s increasingly clear that the government is either unwilling or unable to the be the voice of compassion for our society any more than the business community is going to be the custodian of value. But our society is still valuable and compassionate. What not put some energy into making that manifest?