The Nation: "Occupy Everything Right Now"

[marmar]

"Occupy Everything Right Now"
posted by Richard Kim on 04/10/2009 @ 5:25pm


So said one of the signs at the student occupation of the New School's building at 65 Fifth Avenue, which was met with a phalanx of NYC cops, pepper spray and mass arrests at the request of New School prez Bob Kerrey's administration. On the surface, the students seem a scruffy, wild-eyed lot--tats and unruly beards, raised fists and bold slogans. It's easy for the press to dismiss them as merely "angry" and impetuous. Indeed, comments on the NYT city blog positively seethe with contempt.

"These immature adults are nothing more than terrorists..I would Taser them," writes one poster. "I hope the New School will treat these self-absorbed brats the same way NYU did...paying tuition does NOT mean you get a voice in how the university is run," says another. "A protest that appears to lack direction and realistic demands," quibbles a third.

The harshest of these comments come from the right, but there's an echo of such animosity from the world-weary left as well--a tendency to roll eyes and scoff at the students' naivete. Earlier this year, when NYU students occupied the student center, some left-leaning faculty privately complained that they couldn't totally support the students because of their naive strategy and incoherent, sprawling demands. (One of the students' demands, for example, was to set aside a number of scholarships for students from the Occupied Territories.) Many faculty eventually signed a letter protesting the NYU administration's treatment of the demonstrators, but few prominent figures or outside movements came to the student's defense, and the whole incident fizzled in public consciousness as just another rash, incidental campus uprising.

And then there's the state of general malaise that seems to preoccupy the left now. If there's so much roiling populist anger, where are the mass street protests in the US that would rival those in Greece, Latvia and France (see Sudhir Venkatesh's op-ed and Stephen Greenhouse's analysis of American labor's relative docility)? If only 53 percent of Americans believe capitalism is better than socialism, as a recent Rasmussen poll reports, why aren't the people storming the palace? ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/425979/occupy_everything_right_now