While I have been generally supportive of Occupy Wall Street, I’ve also had a problem wrapping my head about the specifics of what they want.
Well, Matt Taibb had the same problem, but he grocks it now:
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It’s about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a “beloved community” free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
Just go read the rest.
For better than 30 years, I have been hearing that left movements "right now, …just needs to grow."
It is nonsense. They need to get out there and organize. They need to develop candidates at all levels of government who a) can govern (e.g. fill pot holes) b) adhere to a program, and c) agree with a movement program.