Cloud Computing

Say what you want about the Occupy Wall Street crowd, but can we really call them "hippies"?

I don't monitor media activity around these sorts of things like I used to back when I was scrounging for post material every single day, so my sense of this might not be as sharp as I would like. The broad strokes I'm getting from the contra-movementarians is that we shouldn't bother paying attention to hordes congregating around the major lanes of macroeconomic piracy because a) they didn't show up with a PowerPoint presentation outlining a plan of positive action and b) dirty smelly hippies!

To the first point, look, there are two kinds of public protests: proactive and reactive. A proactive protest forms from recognizing a specific injustice and implementing a plan of action to foment a pre-formulated, executable social change. This would be something like your Montgomery bus boycott: disruptive, impactful, directed, maybe not so mobby, and with a definable endgame. A reactive protest happens when people are pissed off and have free time. This latter form may have some cursory organizational impetus, but it's usually amorphous and unreasonably high-minded, with most of its rhetorical and organizational edge blunted by the fog associated with large-scale organizational logistics and a shocking amount of weed. Actions of this type include Occupy Wall Street, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the invasion of Iraq.

Some heroes of the Fourth Estate have soberly insisted the protests are dismissible because the protesters lack a plan. What that absolutely reasonable demand for pie charts and histograms fails to take into consideration is the sentiment expressed in the sign held in the picture above: shit is fucked up and bullshit. These people don't have a plan. They barely have a slogan. One thing they do have: nowhere else to be any time soon. And that they have in buckets.

Referring to them as "hippies" is a further attempt to minimize and distract and dismiss. Who likes hippies? Even actual hippies have the good sense to be embarrassed by hippies. We know this because they grew up and bought shoes and vacation homes and married ketchup heiresses and lost the 2004 presidential election. It isn't fair to say hippies "sold out" when all that really happened to them is they had kids and-- at least the ones worth a fuck to any society--realized those kids needed feeding and housing and educating. They got folded in to the big layer cake of the mainstream, but to their credit, dragged in a little bit of their hippie thought pollution, giving us modern environmentalism, great strides toward actual gender equality and political correctness. As a result, all we've done in return is bend every single solitary economic aspect of our society to the maintenance of Baby Boomers and their entitlements at the expense of everyone else. But at least we also aren't allowed to say "retard" or "midget" anymore!

So it's not fair to call the Occupy Wall Street crowd hippies. Hippies could look forward to Social Security, reasonable healthcare costs and a political system responsive to voter action and constituent pressure. These people are nothing like that at all.