This morning after watching Groupon do its IPO on the NASDAQ (and being flabbergasted by the crazy valuation – but that’s a different story), my dad and I decided to check out the people who are against the excesses happening in the financial world.
After reading online about the Occupy Wall Street movement over the past 6 weeks I had a bit of sympathy for some of their points of view, but most of their demands and ideas are quite different from mine. I am not sure if I am part of the 99% that they claim to represent, but after today’s visit I have the feeling they only represent 1% of the population instead of 99%.
Maybe the movement has changed since they started on September 17, but when I went to their camp I was disappointed with what I saw there. Not intellectuals with interesting ideas, but mainly a bunch of hippies making music and holding up signs. Some still hailed from the flower power era it seemed, and others would have fit right into the 60s. The way they spread their messages about upcoming demonstrations, one person announcing something and the whole group repeating it, felt like something you would do in primary school. It’s probably functional, but I almost had to laugh when several people could not even correctly remember and repeat a single sentence.
To me they felt like a group of misfits, who find meaning in their lives by being part of a group that is against society. But these are not the people who will be able to change the world. I almost felt sorry for them: it was quite cold and windy in Zuccotti Park and the spirit of ‘changing the world’ seems to have long gone. Maybe I visited at the wrong moment, but in my opinion this group does not deserve the attention it gets in the press. They may have started the Occupy movement, but if this is the core of the organization I think the whole operation will be over sooner rather than later.
