The 'smallness' of OWS

Perspective isn't one of the media's more reliable attributes; thus our impression that the Occupy Wall Street movement is both massive and influential.

We hear it, we read it every day: a storm of outrage, a swell of protesters, a torrential collectivity hammering the mighty but unjust few. This, we're informed, is change in manifest action -- the power of agitation.

But then there's this, from the New Republic's Walter Shapiro, who recently spent a few days "in-country":

What struck me was the sincere and good-natured smallness of it all....

[A] Tuesday afternoon Millionaires March up Park Avenue ... attracted about 500 mostly middle-aged, union-affiliated demonstrators. And in late Wednesday afternoon’s drizzle, 400 temporary residents of Zuccotti Park tried to march the roughly eight blocks to Wall Street....

This is not the 1967 Pentagon March or anything like it. Nothing I saw in New York this week justifies the current level of the-whole-world-is-watching media coverage.

Even if it were comparable to the '67 Pentagon March, we should remind ourselves of how many more years the Vietnam war dragged on.

I've always been puzzled by street protests, American-style. The ones that turn violent merely alienate the true masses, while the chronically peaceful ones merely earn officeholders' indifference.

Comments

[CK MacLeod]

To quote the perhaps politically incorrect title of a film by Werner Herzog, even dwarfs started small.

Comparing OWS to events at the height of the anti-Vietnam protest movement is kind of ludicrous - though I'm not sure that Shapiro meant to make an argument from raw numbers. Historians like to isolate the small Free Speech Movement protests and the relatively mild first-generation SDS as a beginning point for what exploded several years later nation- and worldwide. But even later on, reactionaries liked to say that on any given weekend there were many, many more people gathered in American cities to watch football games than to protest the Vietnam War.

It does make a difference how many people you gather: A 1,000-person protest is more significant than a 1-person protest - usually, though not always - but who's to say that 1,000 people "protesting" 24/7 for x weeks doesn't "demonstrate" something as significant as 100,000 people - or 500,000 - gathering for an afternoon in good weather at the Washington Mall?

There are many different things being "demonstrated." Among them this time around is something that arouses panicky, often foully vindictive and hilariously priggish (petit bourgeois, in fact) reactions from American Tea Party and Wall Street conservatives. What happens from here, and what OWS turns out to seem to have meant, is anybody's guess, but, at a minimum, it demonstrates that what we used to call "The People" may not go along quietly with the effective end rule by, for, and of their kind.

[ronalda]

The cleverness of this protest is that it is in the heart of the media world, New York City, with a very memorable and marketable name - "Occupy Wall Street (with its easy to use acronym "OWS"). This is not to denigrate the ideals of these people, as I share them. They are using a very good way to broadcast (literally) and amplify their message.

[Peter G]

I've always been a tad suspicious of anyone who claims to represent ninety-nine percent of any population. That being said it all seems to be going reasonably well despite repeated attempts by misguided idiots to challenge the police. The downside to this is that violence gets all the coverage and prevents the protests from growing into something useful. Pretty much standard for modern protests.