Occupy Wall Street

What's happening on Wall Street is a good thing in that attention is being brought to the need for reigning in the speculative capitalization that is weighing our economy down. I believe this capitalization is inherent and unavoidable when those who have the means to capitalize on a pending disaster freely do so at the expense of the rest of us. However, I also believe that it is merely a symptom of an economy in collapse caused by other problems. What those problems are may be debatable, but at least in the case of the housing market crisis, it is undeniable that direct government intervention was the cause. However, policy is not the point of this essay.

As citizens of an increasingly nominal republic, what is happening on Wall Street should give us cause to gird ourselves for the coming cultural conflict that will greatly resemble that of the 1960's. Nobody wanted war in the 1960's. Politicians engaged in the conflict for strategic reasons, and the 'Greatest Generation' sent their sons off to fulfill their duty. As the Vietnam War drug on, public dissatisfaction with the course of the war was near universal from what I can tell. However, the vast majority of mature, conservative Americans chose not to voice their dissatisfaction publicly feeling that to do so would be an expression of disloyalty. The populist uprising that came to be the face of anti-war expression was composed almost entirely of young people and encouraged by their professors who used their students' enthusiasm and malleability to incarnate their Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist views in American society. The moral high ground attained by these young protestors' anti-war sentiment was used to legitimize these inherently anti-American views which were then allowed to develop in the minds and actions of this generation of people and their protégés until we find ourselves today in a completely divided America.

Listen to the words of this new generation of (again) young protestors. The policy prescriptions that they cite are incorherent and related to a problem that they cannot specifically define but simply refer to as "injustice". Here's the danger! A fight is being drawn up over some issue that nobody can rightly define. What's to stop these people from defining it in any way they want? What's to stop them from focusing in on policy solutions that don't coherently address what is really the problem but rather what they feel is the problem because addressing that thing makes them feel better? Revolutionary history is instructive in this area. Once upon a time there were twin revolutions. One was fought against extremely well-defined policy and was fought for extremely well-defined reasons. The other was an unbridled emotional outburst against "injustice". I ask you, in which of these two revolutions were innocent heads cut off?

We need to be quick to define what this is all about because frankly, in these people's eyes, my neck is vulnerable!