Are you thoroughly sick of all things to do with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Whatever? Pro and anti? Tired of hearing about it, tired of arguing about it, tired of the overhyped mega-partisanship?
I'm tired of hearing about it and don't want to debate it anymore. Everyone has their entrenched position and just spews venom at the other side. It's pointless.
What say you? Tired of hearing about it yet?
I'm not tired of hearing about, although I don't want to hear about it 24/7.
I'm going to be honest here. The OWS movement
really reminds me of the Green Revolution in Iran. Now, in regards to that, I don't mean the political oppression - rather, I mean the obstacles that the populace face.
During the Green Revolution, I was listening to NPR and they were covering it quite a bit. What I got from that coverage was that the reasons why the Iranians were protesting was because of the following reasons:
1) about 50% of the Iranian population is under the age of 25
2) those 20-somethings are mostly college or university educated
3) they can't get jobs that pay to the level of their education
So the issues that caused unrest in Iran is causing unrest here in the U.S., and with good reason.
But I don't see either movement as
political - rather, I see them as
societal.
By that, I mean that I don't think most of the Iranians necessarily mind living under an authoritarian religious-based government so long as the government is able to provide the Iranian populace with jobs that provide them with good pay. Likewise, I don't think OWS really mind Wall Street and the big financial firms so long as they provide the U.S. populace with jobs that provide them with good pay.
These are some serious social issues and they need to be addressed and resolved. If they aren't addressed, then the things that cause such societal unrest don't go away - they remain until they
are resolved.
Also, yesterday on NPR I heard something quite interesting. Someone who worked for a Wall Street firm decided to put on his blue business suit and go down to the OWS camp. He went to the Anarchist Information Center there and he talked to the people there. He said he was able to educate them on Wall Street and they were able to educate him on anarchy.
Another thing he did was he talked to his non-Wall Street friends and asked them how important the financial firms were to the U.S. economy. They said about 20%. He then asked his Wall Street friends how important the firms were to the economy. They said about 80%. So he pointed out the huge difference in the perceived value of these financial firms.
So this got me thinking that a really good idea to do would be to get the CEOs of these Wall Street firms and the leading advocates of the Occupy Wall Street movement and put them in a room together and get them to talk to each other. Maybe if both sides were able to talk and communicate directly face-to-face both sides would become sympathetic with each other and both sides can start working together to resolve the issues troubling them both rather than clash with each other.
After all, a number of corporations are becoming more socially aware and active. I know that one of these is Starbucks. The Starbucks Corporation is getting involved in improving education here in the U.S. They also set up a micro-loan program for farmers in Africa. So some of these big businesses are doing very important social work.
That is something I'd like to see much more of. Maybe by getting both sides to talk to each other, discuss these issues, and come up with methods of attaining solutions, we can resolve these problems that's causing social unrest.