Posted on October 4, 2011, Printed on October 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152610/putting_pundits_to_shame%3A_protesters_know_exactly_what_they%27re_fighting_for
It should come as a surprise to nobody that the corporate media's early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has featured an abundance of hippie-punching but very little about the substantive issues driving thousands of Americans to take over the streets of cities across the country.
As I approached the 30 or so activists who have been camped out for weeks in front of the Federal Reserve Building as part of OccupySF – a protest smaller than those in New York, Boston or Los Angeles – I'd been primed by news stories heaping scorn on these ostensibly confused, foul-smelling rebels-without-a-cause, but what I encountered was very different.
I discovered that while their style may not have been as mainstream as that of the retirees attending a Glenn Beck rally, they knew precisely what they were there for. They had specific demands and even a simple-to-understand "bumper-sticker" message. “We stand for the 99 percent who don't have much of a voice in this system,” a young woman named Melissa told me. A recent graduate with “not much in the way of job prospects,” she said she'd never been involved in a protest before.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment