Making Sense of 'Occupy Wall Street'

It's only a 'protest against everything' because 'everything' is so utterly screwed up.

Though the "Occupy Wall Street" protests have been criticized as being aimless, the movement is now spreading across the U.S. and into Canada, leading all sorts of talking heads to chime in with advice. The Washington Post's Jonathan Capeheart offers some relatively useful insight to the protesters, courtesy of the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street needs "a clear path for changing the policies that have engendered so much justified rage," says Capeheart, so as to get Washington onside. "Until the movement identifies specific pieces of legislation that are languishing in Congress or proposes its own, House members and Senators inclined to hop on board might not, lest they be seen as trying to co-opt the movement." That's a tactic that the Tea Party used to great effect over the health care act and basically everything else Barack Obama's tried to pass over the past two years. Granted, the politician best suited to galvanize the left's populist rage resigned earlier this year, but the movement needs some endorsement – tacit or otherwise– from those with the power to actually address their concerns if it wants to grow beyond the malcontents of Williamsburg.

The National Post's Kelly McParland wonders just what the Canadian wings of Occupy Wall Street will protest about, as "Canadians protesting home foreclosures and the 2008 bailouts will have to work a bit harder to be upset, since those didn’t happen here." He draws a nice false equivalency between the Arab Spring uprising and "Tahrir Square, Canadian version, where the protesters already have democracy and human rights but want something more. Just don’t ask what," as if these rights were all that people needed to lead fulfilling lives. While the specifics of activist anger might differ between the U.S. and Canada, trust us, Mr. McParland, there are more than enough economic issues plaguing young Canadians to give them something to kvetch about on Bay Street. Where to start ... youth unemployment is double the national average, the average cost of a house in Vancouver or Toronto keeps real estate out of the reach of everyone save the rich, post-secondary education is as expensive as it's ever been. Indeed, those criticisms of the "protests against everything" miss the glaringly obvious point that their lack of a single message is due to so many of the givens of previous generations – homes, jobs, pensions – now being out of the current one's grasp.

That theme is one that the Vancouver Sun's Pete McMartin picks up on after spending a week in New York, where he sensed palpable anger among the protesters, one of whom held a placard yelling "Jump! You F***ers" to traders and bankers in the surrounding buildings. "When a movement is more interested in defenestration than in defining its demands, it's time to sit up and take notice," notes McMartin. We hate to read too much into one protester's cardboard sign, but such anger is a somewhat understandable response to this "sense of betrayal, and ... an entrepreneurial and financial class plundering the American Dream." That's a sentiment shared across the border, too, even if the effects of it here haven't been as immediate or dire. And that anger will only metastasize if the core issues – income inequality in the U.S., unemployment in Canada – are left to fester.