Many people spend their lives trying to reconcile their hopes for themselves with the world—indifferent, skeptical—as it is. Yet, there are times when one feels either most optimistic or most threatened, and then one challenges that complacency, the self-satisfaction of the comfortable and the powerful. The global economic crisis, rooted in deception, greed, and mismanagement of financial services, and the rise and fall of industries and the vulnerability of workers, has emboldened or frightened people in different parts of the world. Some want to conserve what they have, refusing to share; and other know they require more, as others do. Some look with disdain at the poor and suffering, and some look with frustration at the rich and determined. People have begun to protest; and some have begun to riot. It is important to remember that a protest is both an affirmation of citizenship and a statement of alienation from formal power; whereas a riot is a movement behind civic purpose. In the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been going on for weeks, people have gathered in downtown Manhattan, and other parts of the United States and Europe, to draw attention to the division between financial success and power on one side and, on the other, the rest of the world. The common charge is that many of the corporations and people who have caused so much damage have been protected and rewarded, while ordinary people have lost jobs, housing, health care, and more. The protesters have called for a more honest, vital democratic discourse with real world consequences benefitting the disenfranchised. First, they were judged harshly by some, judged as lazy and resentful and self-indulgent, but the more people have heard of their complaints and demands, the greater the understanding and sympathy they have drawn. Who are these people? One early photograph printed in New York magazine showed a slim, slack-bodied shirtless young white man in shorts, holding up a cardboard sign, facing policemen, but when Time magazine filed a report, it presented a group more diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, profession, and fashion taste. The protesters are people with very different lives but whom have come to see common problems; and they do not want to be alone with their anger or their distress—and in joining with others, they are renewing their own hopes.
