Today marks a full month from when a small group of upstarts started a cultural revolution, focusing on bringing sunlight to the darkness of corporate greed. Since that time, people from across the United States and around the world have taken up public space, “#Occupying” for the sake of sending a universal single finger salute to “The Man.”
The question is “Who is The Man?”
Is he the CEO of Bank of America who accepted $50 million in public bailout money only to turn around and spend $50 million to lobby against the Employee Free Choice Act that would help workers organize for fair pay and benefits? Is it President Obama who turned fear into hope and promised change, the kind that we all hoped we could believe in only to find the decks stacked squarely against him? Perhaps it is the Congresspeople who continue to make decisions on behalf of their constituents who are not necessarily representative of those constituents thanks to the near full ownership through political contributions.
In fact, “the Man” has become so amorphous that many pundits continue to sit on the sidelines pointing at the #Occupy folks for not having any sort of cohesive, defined target upon which to cast blame. Despite having about 22 clear, outlined demands, the conversation is focused on whether or not these young upstarts have “message clarity.”
The idea that people have become so dumbed down to 140 character discourse that the 22 written demands of #Occupy is impossible to comprehend is, in and of itself, hard to understand. The very conversation may not then be about “message clarity” at all, but of a patriarchal idea that working people are unable to comprehend the complexity of the spiderweb that corporations, shell companies and executives are using to prevent us from uncovering the truth.
According to traditional message pundits, it would be impossible for a few dozen Wall Street protesters to grow to hundreds of thousands of protesters ~ offline and online ~ around the world, let alone do it in four weeks flat. The pundits have it all wrong.
#Occupy isn’t succeeding because they have “message clarity.”
It's succeeding because they have "moral clarity."