Staff Editorial: Occupy Wall Street

A now two-week-long takeover of the area surrounding New York City's financial headquarters, that has come to be known as "Occupy Wall Street," is gaining both attention and momentum.

According to the Adbuster's (one of the many groups that is credited with organizing the protest) website, Occupy Wall Street is "a people powered movement for democracy…with an encampment in the financial district of New York City."

The organizers of the movement cite the recent Egyptian uprising as one of the inspirations for their efforts to "end the monied corruption of our democracy." The movement has recently spread to several other cities including Chicago, Boston, and D. C.

On Sept. 17, thousands of protestors gathered in Zuccoti Park, which protestors have renamed Liberty Park, near Wall Street, or Liberty Square, in response to Adbuster's July 13 call for action. The call asked that "twenty thousand people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, and peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months."

Although economic frustrations served as the catalyst for mobilization, the varying nature of the participants slogans like "fight for jobs and education, not for giant corporations" and signs from expressions of disgust regarding the bailout of Wall Street bankers to requests to end the death penalty, have demonstrated that they are concerned with the improvement of society as a whole.

While there has been a great deal of debate and criticism about what the demands of those protesting actually are, several of the protestors are reluctant to establish a set list of demands explaining that they do not want to be constrained or defined by narrow requests because they hope to create widespread change in many different arenas. Many of the demonstrators pride themselves on not having a single leader and on the communal nature of their efforts.

A live stream of the current state of the protest shows participants operating as though they were an echo, repeating the statements of the main speaker of the moment in order to communicate organizational strategies and messages of empowerment to the large crowd.

Celebrity appearances by Cornell West, among many others, have helped to galvanize activists and to inform the public about the protests.

The response of the New York Police Department has also been a major source of controversy as police have used mace and other abrasive tactics to arrest and detain hundreds of people.

Occupy Wall Street represents the contradiction of stereotypes about American and youth apathy. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening and the American people as a whole can no longer stand the strain.

For the first time in several decades, people—and not just people of color--are openly expressing and acting upon their feelings of anger, betrayal, and disappointment with the state of our union.

Just as the people of Egypt and several other countries in the Middle East and North Africa united in their refusal to continue to accept the status quo, many Americans are experiencing a wake-up call of their own as they discover that the great Dream is becoming increasingly removed from their individual grasps.

Our View: Occupy Wall Street is the class-inspired realization of the limits of opportunity and access in American society.