Call Me When the Proletariat Arrives

This week's non-story is about the hundreds of college kids who have decided to occupy Wall Street (or nearby) in homage to Tahrir square or Syria, or London, or whatever. Thoughtful quotes from freshmen at Hampton and Colgate permeate the two or three stories that made the latter pages of the world's news. Nobody was hurt. A lot of clever signs were raised. Nothing was broken. Drums were beaten on. A few people have been arrested for wearing masks.

But I want this to become a real story. Like perhaps most people, I want this to catch fire. I just don't know how.

As long as such civil disobedience is relegated to the liberal-arts set, I don't see it picking up much traction. And yet, for better or worse, college campuses have always been homes to revolutionary thinking. Nobody else has the time, freedom of thought, or stake in the future to challenge the way things are. Mass movements out of Teheran, Prague, Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley, and Cairo all provide good examples. But for each of those examples are countless other protests that fizzled into a whiny whimper. The 90s anti-globalization movement is a good example of something heady and abstract that never made sense to most people. The Battle in Seattle was a revolutionary moment for a few anarchists, and a pointless riot for everyone else.

But this isn't an intellectual debate like globalization. There are a set of basic issues that matter to the college kids as much as they matter to the working stiff. Kids are coming out of school with massive debt and no prospect of paying it off with a good-paying job. In a larger sense, we are all indentured servants to the banks who call Wall Street home. Fundamentally, people need to find ways to live well without the need to accumulate crushing liabilities. In other words, unless we are all right with our standard of living and economic opportunity averaging somewhere between Peru's and Albania's, we need to make America a better place to live and work. We need everyday people to to start profiting from economic growth, not just the handful of sharp-beaked, cold eagle-eyed investors perched in their plush leather nests high above the Street.

Where is the critical mass this time? The difference between a mass movement and a bunch of rich kids carrying signs is easy to describe in retrospect. Energy builds, a spark jumps a gap from campus to the cable guy, and everything changes almost overnight. But how? What's made the difference in the past? What might make the difference now?

The doctrine of socialism, with its appeal to class interest across borders and races, has helped the process along in certain instances. Other unifying forces, like religion, have contributed elsewhere. A galvanizing event, like war or economic collapse can unite people, but may also divide them. There's probably no easy pattern. Union Square is not Tahrir Square is not Tianenmen Square. Religion in some places is intensely divisive, many places have employed unimaginably brutal repression, while class is a non-starter here. In the end, every case is different. Every outcome varies with the players and their stakes in the game. Something might happen out of this, but I doubt it. But some unifying factor has to emerge.

Stuff is bad, and not just for college kids. It's bad for working families too. But somehow we don't see the problems in a mutually identifiable way. We are all keenly aware of something vaguely malevolent, something predatorial, hiding just out of site. The requisite level of energy has been building for some time; it's just that our complaints have remained largely parochial. Nobody has a truly national view of things. What is our unifying factor? How can we capture all our grievances in a sentence?

We're all struggling with debt while we watch our chances at a decent living go down the toilet. We're all bearing witness to our public assets' and our national pride's slow erosion. Everyone knows that a few predators lurk in the shadows of industry. But it's one thing to tell everyone on Facebook to show up in Lower Manhattan with a tent. It's another to really organize something. What is the message? What is the medium? This isn't Cairo. It's getting cold in New York, and besides, who has time to camp out?

I'd really like it if we all found some way of demanding that this economy starts working for all of us. Many people share that stultifying sense that mysterious forces circle high above our heads, taking what they wish, leaving the rest of us to scurry for shelter. Many, many of us, across the political and cultural spectrum feel these things. We should all be rooting for these kids, ridiculous as they may seem. It's these kids who can really start something.

For me, the moment the kids can get a decent turnout for high school-educated Wal-Mart cashiers, unemployed middle managers, returning vets, and maybe a few pensioners, they'll have a movement I can get behind. But until then, they have buried news story I'll ignore, just like everybody else.