Revenge of the Nerds

[Robert Oak]

Plain vanilla, middle-aged, middle class Americans turn into
globalization protesters and political activists due to
outsourcing, H-1b, L-1 Visas.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=368

[mzmolly]

1. Snip here...

Forget about tattooed, black-masked anarchists. Today’s anti-globalization protester is just as likely to be the middle-aged, middle-class computer engineer next door.

John Napier doesn't look like the type of guy you would expect to see at a street protest. His oversized glasses and scrawny frame call to mind not a political agitator, but Rick Moranis circa Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Yet the 53-year-old technical engineer was one of the more vocal protesters when he stood outside the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City with other unemployed information technology--or IT--professionals. Sporting thinning hair and paunches under short-sleeved polo shirts, the dozen or so men were picketing a conference for executives that focused on sending jobs overseas. Among the slogans on the signs they held: "Will code for food."

"It was just hot-and-cold-running Mercedeses pulling up to the building for three days, 12 hours a day," Napier remembers. As the suits got out of their air-conditioned cars, some of them heckled the protesters, telling them to go get jobs. Napier and the others yelled back: "We can't find one! That's why we're here!"

Napier's political education had lapsed after the Vietnam War, during which he was a foot soldier in demonstrations against the draft. Since then, he says, he has lived a "vanilla life" in Boston. At the Waldorf protest, he became alarmed when a photographer lurched out of a crowd of demonstrators in front of him, snapped his picture, then faded back into a stream of pedestrians. Napier thought it might have been a hired thug from one of the computer companies he had harassed, and he worried about his apartment back in Massachusetts. But when he told one of the more experienced protesters, she brushed it off, saying the photographer was probably working for the FBI. "They said, 'Oh, yeah, shit, this thing happens all the time,'" says Napier. "I thought, Phew, just the FBI."

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=368