At the New York Times Room for Debate, the efficacy of Occupy Wall Street is the subject of discussion. The introduction is troubling:
If you stopped by Zuccotti Park in New York and asked 10 protesters what their goals were for Occupy Wall Street, you might get 10 different answers. This has led some reports to call the group unfocused, but that may be normal for an emerging movement: would 10 young Egyptians in Tahrir Square in January have been any more unanimous?
Well, yeah, The Egyptians would have been unanimous about the removal of Mubarak, the end of his reign over Egypt. Whether he would be replaced with a democratic government or a religious oligarchy might have been in dispute, but they all agreed that it was time for Mubarak to go.
And so it is with Occupy Wall Street, where the protesters, who no one would have known existed had the New York Police Department not put them on the map, who all agree that corporate greed, and its ownership of the nice men and women elected to run our government, has well served the one percent, but not done as much for the other 99. Beyond that, it’s not clear.
The discussion focuses politics and the values of the masses in addressing economic inequity. Of course, there are anarchists and labor unionists, likely a few syndicalists thrown in for good measure. But that misses the point. There’s no unity of purpose beyond making the point that things are not right as they now exist. What it should be, and how that should be achieved, is a fight yet to be had.
Nathan Schneider, editor of WagingNonviolence.org, begins the discussion with what I see as the most salient point:
The main thing that Occupy Wall Street is doing right also happens to be the main thing these protesters are doing in the first place: sticking around. Merciless persistence is a large part of what made the Arab Spring work: those in the streets in Egypt and Tunisia managed to hold on longer than their rulers could.
The inability to persist dooms almost every effort to effect change. Whether we chalk it up to our 2.7 second attention span, or the fact that there are plenty of fun things to do on the internet to keep us off the streets, we tend to scream very loud for a moment and move on. While those in power might prefer we not scream at all, they’ve figured out that if they ignore us, we eventually go away and they go on with their business as if nothing happened. That because nothing happened. Nothing that matters, anyway.
Over the past few days, I’ve been playing something of a game on twitter with my dear friends, Kyle, Mandy and Rachel, of the KitchenAid (a subdivision of Whirlpool Corporation) social media team. It’s putatively got to do with my refrigerator, which has taken to twitter and become something of a celebrity, getting a nod from Elie Mystal at Above the Law, a post by Sam Glover at Caveat Emptor and an interview with Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch. For the record, I am not @SHGrefrigerator.
There’s been plenty of fun and laughs along the way, but it’s always made a mess of KitchenAid’s social media branding campaign and effort to pretend that they truly care. For some, it’s been a bit persistent, causing some to get bored of it, and others to question why their toaster issues aren’t worthy of similar social media concern.
Twitter “expert” Adrian Dayton, informed me that
@ScottGreenfield of all your causes, this is perhaps the one in least need of a coalition of angry lawyers. #savethefridges
In the scheme of things to be concerned about, my refrigerator is trivial. But Adrian demonstrates the common mistake of a person who has never stood for anything, always ready with an excuse to avoid involvement. Maybe KitchenAid will hire Adrian to teach its people how to twit, since they aren’t doing a very good job of it at the moment.
This “cause” is one that seeks to hold a corporation to honor its obligations to a consumer. It helps me. It helps you too. Just as KitchenAid has offered a thousand apologies for the inconvenience (about what isn’t really important at the moment), it’s done nothing but taken money and failed at every turn by its own incompetence to deliver what it promised. In this regard, it’s just another day in the life of an American.
I had a nice chat with a guy named Richard last night. Richard is a working man, fixing appliances for a variety of manufacturers. He got the order to call me from Mandy, the KitchenAid social media team analog of Adrian Dayton.
Richard is supposed to come fix my problem this morning, despite Mandy’s having explained that he should come “after hours” because she couldn’t fathom the underlying problem, that KitchenAid techs had already failed to show twice this week and I wasn’t going to dedicate any more of my life to them. She thought “after hours” meant that it wouldn’t cost me a day of work. She doesn’t realize that life goes on 24/7, that the problem is failure, not timing. Her goal is to try to avoid failure.
We laughed about Mandy’s lack of grasp of the problem, her vision of the paradigm of consumer as subject to the will of company policy. Adrian’s grasp is to use his twitter Klout to upset no one, to do nothing to ever scare away a follower lest he be relegated back to the couch, eating the Cheetos of the unemployed, having failed to produce anything of value to anyone. Like Mandy, his goal is to try to avoid failure.
What distinguishes Occupy Wall Street is that the movement persists, despite its lack of agreement about the goal. I persist despite the trivial nature of a fridge problem in the scheme of far greater problems in the world. There are some who have chosen to stand for something . There are some whose lives are filled with avoiding failure.
It’s not yet clear when my refrigerator issues will come to a conclusion, though I suspect Richard, a working man, will do what he says he will do. Working men, unlike corporate wanks, tend to understand the different between doing something and talking about doing something. They tend to keep their word. It’s not yet clear when OccupyWallStreet protestors will go home either. They don’t have a working man to speak to.
But large or small the issue, we can either do nothing or do something. In all likelihood, I won’t agree with what many of the Occupy Wall Street protestors want to see happen to America, but I am completely behind the fact that they are living in Zuccotti Park, sleeping in the cold, enduring pepper spray and the occasional wallop in the head, because they will not sit quietly, obediently, and do nothing.
You may not like what Occupy Wall Street is doing. You may not like what I’m doing. You may not like what anyone else who won’t shut up and do what they’re told is doing. And what are you doing? You won’t make enemies sitting on the couch eating Cheetos, you know. You won’t make a difference either.
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Thank goodness for all the squeaky wheels out there.
Dayton is in the business of enabling consumer fraud. Of course he wants you to shut up.