Pitchforks

I first started following Occupy Wall Street for the same reason I paid attention to the DSK debacle - it was local news. Granted, Wall Street's a famous street to put it mildly, and next to a famous site where there was a certain terrorist attack, but it's also smack dab in the middle of a really boring residential neighborhood, one I lived in until quite recently. Nothing happens in-and-around Battery Park City, but when anything does (hurricanes, presidential visits, not to mention tragic attacks that change the course of international relations) it's huge. OWS now looks like it qualifies.

And... I'm not sure what to make of it. It's generally not my thing - as longtime readers would have guessed - to fully sign on to any list of views intended to encompass the entire right or left, even if I generally lean more towards the latter. Or to think it's inherently wonderful to skip school to go protest something - maybe first be clear what you're protesting? But in the case of OWS, most of the demands make sense, and some are quite urgent.

This Daily Mail story, meanwhile, and yes, I understand it's the Daily Mail, takes away whatever urge I might have had to suspect that the entire thing is a bunch of rich kids without office jobs (b/c too young or too hip-and-rich) playing at being hippies, because it so overshoots the mark. I mean, "designer" jeans might be used and have cost $10, private-college students are often enough not paying the full ticket price, and I don't know what their problem is with that girl's "trendy knitwear," aka she's young and wearing a nondescript sweater. And wow, students who own laptops! Someone really needs to sit down the British paper and explain about loans, credit cards, and the fact that even if some of these kids are genuinely so trust-funded and one-percentish that they're not even going to be impacted by a bleak job market after graduation, they might still protest in solidarity.

And David Brooks's column on OWS... reminded me why Adbusters was ringing a bell, but didn't really resolve what one should do if one is simultaneously Jewish and put off by the massive income disparity in America. Populism is dangerous and not something we at WWPD generally go for, but so too is anti-populism so strong that its message is, the people should put up with absolutely anything.

And there's going to be a hint of anti-Semitism tangentially related to everything on the left or the right, so as much as Brooks ought to have my anti-anti-Semitic backing on this one, not entirely. Going by Facebook, my Jewish (as in, active in Jewish stuff) friends are if anything disproportionately involved in/excited about what's happening downtown (well, up north, as I type from the woods). It doesn't seem, thus far, that the "1%," the "nefarious elite" Brooks thinks is being unfairly maligned, is being conflated with "Jews" by anyone other than this one nutcase who's been mentioned, of course, all over these Internets.

So if I still lived there, would I be joining the crowd? I wouldn't rule it out. There's something about living amidst the bankers while not being one that can make, if not the entire city, then much of it, feel inaccessible, or at least not intended for you. But the dudes in the pale-blue button-downs enjoying happy-hour next to the Financial Center aren't all of it. There are also the rents propped up by the number of young and not-so-young adults whose parents will pay $3,000 a month and up to make sure their kids never, not even for that post-college year, have to live on a street in Prospect Heights where cops get shot (a phenomenon that has its way of trickling down to it costing $3,000 a month to live on a street in Prospect Heights where just a few years back, cops got shot). These tend not to be young people who work in finance. They may wear old-looking clothes and don't outright announce that this is their set-up, but if you're renting and this is not your set-up, you confront it anyhow, when as an adult with a salary the broker asks if he can call up your mother. Because if you're young, white, and do something other than i-banking, your parents surely pay your rent.

The city, in other words, struck me sometimes as being divided between the openly arrogant finance-types, on the one hand, and on the other, the what, me privileged? crowd of discreetly trust-funded sorts with cool-sounding jobs and endless funds for doing things in the evenings that do not involve the rehydration of dry pasta and maybe a sub-$10 bottle of wine, for special occasions. (The term we're looking for here: hipsters.) And this was my impression as someone privileged enough not to need college loans, lucky enough to have been employed (if we're calling funded grad school employment) during stretches when many were not, wise enough - maybe? - not to have gone to a grad school that would have meant taking out loans. So whatever rage I might feel on behalf of myself is slight compared with what I do on behalf of others.

I don't know how much this extends to other cities, in particular those now also under "occupation," but when simple things like living in a studio apartment, getting dinner or drinks out somewhere that looks casual, going to the movies, etc. start to seem out-of-reach for anyone without a finance job or family money, the city starts to lose its appeal. Of course, ask me again when I'm on the supermarket shuttle this afternoon, living that carless life in the 'burbs.