OP-ED COLUMNIST
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: October 7, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan is covered with damp sleeping bags, interspersed among piles of wet, abandoned clothes. Molding stuff is everywhere. It looks like a scene from “Outdoor Hoarders.”
Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Gail Collins
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Times Topic: Occupy Wall Street (Wall St. Protests, 2011)
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“How about one big cleaning day?” someone asks during a morning meeting.
The others in the group respond by raising their hands and wiggling their fingers. This is a silent cheer, and I cannot tell you how well it works. You can also boo silently by pointing your fingers down and wiggling them. Why have they never used this in the presidential debates? Rick Perry could be standing there explaining his immigration policy while Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum point to the floor and wiggle like crazy. So much more civilized. Once again, youth has shown us the way.
The demonstrators have been in Zuccotti Park, a few blocks from the actual Wall Street, since Sept. 17, a small core group of a couple hundred that can swell to thousands when it’s time for a protest march.
It’s not clear that the world would ever have noticed them had it not been for the New York Police Department, whose officers keep getting caught doing ill-advised-but-photogenic things like shooting helpless women in the face with pepper spray. As Jim Dwyer pointed out last week in his column in The Times, it does make you reflect on the fact that these are the same guys who now boast that they’ve got the weaponry to shoot down aircraft in the name of antiterrorism.
Occupy Wall Street is now famous. Protesters mimic them in cities around the country. Mitt Romney denounces their “class warfare,” and the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, lashed out at them for “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”
This seems like a huge win for the demonstrators. How many average Americans are sitting at their kitchen tables fretting about class warfare? A Rasmussen poll showed 33 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of the demonstrations, while 27 percent were unfavorable and 40 percent had no idea what the questioner was talking about.
Now Zuccotti Park is the city’s newest tourist attraction, and the protesters seem dug in. They have made an infinite number of decisions about taking in donations, buying supplies, cooking food and mining the social media. What they have not done, as the watching world knows, is to come up with any political platform more specific than a general ticked-offedness about the way the rich keep getting richer while the poor can’t pay their student loans. And the Internet, which is so useful in rousing crowds for a march, is no help whatsoever when it comes to forcing everyone to come up with a specific agenda.
“You get so many voices and so many opinions, it’s hard to find consensus,” said Ambrose Desmond, a 32-year-old psychotherapist from San Francisco who was the leader of the meeting. Or would have been if there were any leaders. Which there most definitely were not.
