New York, Nov. 20 -
Pinal County Greens Co-Chair Richard Grayson reported that few protesters from Occupy Wall Street were left at a heavily guarded, heavily barricaded Zuccotti Park this morning in Manhattan's Financial District.
"The Occupy movement will go on," Grayson said, "in New York and Phoenix and Tucson and all over America. The 99% will continue their campaign to address the issues of income inequality and the unfair influence of money on the political system."
The Pinal County Greens are members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County.
As David Carr wrote in the New York Times:
Occupy Wall Street is animated by a central, galvanizing idea — that the distribution of wealth is unfair. That struck a very live nerve, grabbing something that was in the air and turning it into simple math: 1 percent should not live at the expense of the other 99 percent.
Still, Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go. In addition to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward.
But if Occupy Wall Street seems inchoate and short on answers, it has plenty of company. The president has primed the pump over and over with borrowed federal largess and still jobs refuse to flow. The myriad Republican debates have become a kind of random gaffe generator with little in the way of serious public proposals.
And by the way, there’s another term for a gathering of politically committed people who make a lot of speeches and argue endlessly over process without producing much in the way of solutions: Congress.
Witness the Congressional supercommittee charged with reducing the nation’s debt, which has spun its wheels to little end as it confronts a partisan divide so wide it would have daunted Evel Knievel.
The country has reached the point where things feel so fundamentally wrong that every suggested remedy seems like a media exercise, a kind of nationwide spin cycle.
Occupy Wall Street may not have the answers, but we all are coming to realize that no one else does either.
