These comments remind me of the Occupy Wall Street protests back in 2011. That movement also didn’t lead to immediate law or policy changes at the national level, but it seems to have left a more subtle mark that is still with us. Income inequality has remained a hot topic, states have raised minimum wages, and UBI proposals are being discussed more seriously (at least in certain circles).
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work (of course, “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys)
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game in favor of the other team), the crowd will remember the injustice, the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd and the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice.
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts.
These comments remind me of the Occupy Wall Street protests back in 2011. That movement also didn’t lead to immediate law or policy changes at the national level, but it seems to have left a more subtle mark that is still with us. Income inequality has remained a hot topic, states have raised minimum wages, and UBI proposals are being discussed more seriously (at least in certain circles).
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work (of course, “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys)
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game in favor of the other team), the crowd will remember the injustice, the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd and the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice.
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts.