Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street movement has not severely impacted me since I got to New York. I have avoided lower Manhattan, and pretty much hoped the cold and wet weather would chase them away. I have no use for anarchy, mob rule, structureless protest, or pointless demonstrations. However, they are now causing me a problem.
I was planning to go to New York tomorrow to spend some time with Meg. She is busy and we have to coordinate our time together around her schedule. (This is no problem for me as I have no schedule.) Tomorrow looked like perhaps the best day of the week. But when I turned on the news this morning I was told that Occupy Wall Street plans to disrupt the entire city tomorrow. First they had planned a march on Wall Street, but like angry hornets, now that their home has been shaken up, they plan to flex their muscle by inconveniencing millions. They did the same thing a month or so ago by trying to take over the Brooklyn Bridge. Now I hear that they plan, as I predicted in a blog months ago, to take over subway lines.
The subway trains are pretty crowded as it is. Most travel in New York City is by subway. People like Meg, or me when I am in town, have no realistic alternative in most cases. Taxis are busy and expensive and buses are subject to the vagaries of traffic. Very few people own cars, and fewer still drive in Manhattan. Subway cars are crowded, and I get a seat only about half the time. In rush hour it is not uncommon for a train to be too full to accommodate everyone who wants to ride. It would not take very many OWS protestors, who seem to have nothing better to do, to overwhelm a particular subway route and basically keep thousands of people from getting home at night, arriving before the curtain goes up for a Broadway show, or making it to work on time.
Of course, these protestors, who claim to be supporting the “99 percent” of working Americans and against the top one percent, would be hurting only those they claim to want to help. The top one percent does not ride the subway. The bottom one percent is certainly on there, as are most of the working people in New York. Their plan, then, has nothing to do with sending a message to those they decry, but is a particularly offensive way to grab headlines.
I wish I could put into words my thoughts about this “movement.” It seems it is primarily made up of coddled young people, idealistic liberals, and misguided and frustrated unemployed. The entire “we pride ourselves on having no solutions” thing strikes me as stupid. If you are going to protest some vague sense of inequity in America (or maybe the world) but you have no plan to change things, then how can you ever hope to achieve change? Not only do they have no goals, no plan, no model, not even any leaders, their complaints are more the ramblings than statements. They are against a lot of stuff, and seem to be for very little. They are supposed to be unified in their problems with big corporations, but they use Facebook with their iPhones to communicate.
Apple is, I believe, the second most-capitalized company in the world, but apparently it are ok with OWS because Apple is cool. That the iPhones they treasure are made in what are little more than sweatshops in China seems not to bother them. Or that Zuckerberg is in the top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent, causes them no heartburn. (Forbes has him at the 14th richest person in a world of seven billion, which puts him in the top .000000002 percent.)
During the World Series one of their number opined that: “You should be able to watch the World Series without supporting a corporation.” Seriously? Have they noticed the names on the stadiums? Four games were played in Busch Stadium. How about the athletes? How many of them are in the 99 percent? Or how about the commercials? This was ok, according to this protestor because they boo the commercials. Boo all you want. Fox was tallying viewers, not supporters.
A couple of weeks ago, David Crosby and Graham Nash, convicted felons, showed up at Zuccotti Park to support the occupiers. They record for Atlantic Records, owned by Warner Music Group, which was purchased by Access Industries for $3.3 billion. Strikes me as a big corporation. According to the website Celebrity Net Worth, by the way, David Crosby is worth $40 million. They did not have Nash’s net worth but he has four homes in California and one in Hawaii. I doubt either Crosby or Nash took the subway.
So tomorrow I may not go to New York. I may have to stay in Stamford watching a bunch of idiots disrupt my life, and to a much large degree the lives of millions of others.
I was planning to go to New York tomorrow to spend some time with Meg. She is busy and we have to coordinate our time together around her schedule. (This is no problem for me as I have no schedule.) Tomorrow looked like perhaps the best day of the week. But when I turned on the news this morning I was told that Occupy Wall Street plans to disrupt the entire city tomorrow. First they had planned a march on Wall Street, but like angry hornets, now that their home has been shaken up, they plan to flex their muscle by inconveniencing millions. They did the same thing a month or so ago by trying to take over the Brooklyn Bridge. Now I hear that they plan, as I predicted in a blog months ago, to take over subway lines.
The subway trains are pretty crowded as it is. Most travel in New York City is by subway. People like Meg, or me when I am in town, have no realistic alternative in most cases. Taxis are busy and expensive and buses are subject to the vagaries of traffic. Very few people own cars, and fewer still drive in Manhattan. Subway cars are crowded, and I get a seat only about half the time. In rush hour it is not uncommon for a train to be too full to accommodate everyone who wants to ride. It would not take very many OWS protestors, who seem to have nothing better to do, to overwhelm a particular subway route and basically keep thousands of people from getting home at night, arriving before the curtain goes up for a Broadway show, or making it to work on time.
Of course, these protestors, who claim to be supporting the “99 percent” of working Americans and against the top one percent, would be hurting only those they claim to want to help. The top one percent does not ride the subway. The bottom one percent is certainly on there, as are most of the working people in New York. Their plan, then, has nothing to do with sending a message to those they decry, but is a particularly offensive way to grab headlines.
I wish I could put into words my thoughts about this “movement.” It seems it is primarily made up of coddled young people, idealistic liberals, and misguided and frustrated unemployed. The entire “we pride ourselves on having no solutions” thing strikes me as stupid. If you are going to protest some vague sense of inequity in America (or maybe the world) but you have no plan to change things, then how can you ever hope to achieve change? Not only do they have no goals, no plan, no model, not even any leaders, their complaints are more the ramblings than statements. They are against a lot of stuff, and seem to be for very little. They are supposed to be unified in their problems with big corporations, but they use Facebook with their iPhones to communicate.
Apple is, I believe, the second most-capitalized company in the world, but apparently it are ok with OWS because Apple is cool. That the iPhones they treasure are made in what are little more than sweatshops in China seems not to bother them. Or that Zuckerberg is in the top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent, causes them no heartburn. (Forbes has him at the 14th richest person in a world of seven billion, which puts him in the top .000000002 percent.)
During the World Series one of their number opined that: “You should be able to watch the World Series without supporting a corporation.” Seriously? Have they noticed the names on the stadiums? Four games were played in Busch Stadium. How about the athletes? How many of them are in the 99 percent? Or how about the commercials? This was ok, according to this protestor because they boo the commercials. Boo all you want. Fox was tallying viewers, not supporters.
A couple of weeks ago, David Crosby and Graham Nash, convicted felons, showed up at Zuccotti Park to support the occupiers. They record for Atlantic Records, owned by Warner Music Group, which was purchased by Access Industries for $3.3 billion. Strikes me as a big corporation. According to the website Celebrity Net Worth, by the way, David Crosby is worth $40 million. They did not have Nash’s net worth but he has four homes in California and one in Hawaii. I doubt either Crosby or Nash took the subway.
So tomorrow I may not go to New York. I may have to stay in Stamford watching a bunch of idiots disrupt my life, and to a much large degree the lives of millions of others.
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