Wall Street protestors exemplify governmental philosophy at its finest
Much has been written about how the purpose of Occupy Wall Street is unclear, or even nonexistent. It helps, when trying to understand a movement that is leaderless and spontaneous, to look at the historical moment that produced it. Even without bothering to apply a dialectic, we plainly see a path through 30 years of deregulation, to excesses in the financial industry, to the economic collapse of 2008, through the Great Recession — which persists for most of us, though Wall Street has rebounded with hardly a scratch — and finally to anger and protest on the streets. There is something happening here, and what it is should be perfectly clear. But there may be something even more important happening. For a moment, forget what the demonstrators are trying to tell us. Stop listening, and look. They're trying to show us something: democracy in action.
I've heard it suggested that protest has no place in a democracy: Our recourse is supposed to be the ballot box. If we're unhappy, we're told, vote for someone else — even if there aren't good choices. Protest is vital to democracy: Democracy doesn't work if any voice is silent. In order for democracy to function, we must always be ready to raise our voices and keep raising them until we are heard. No major change has been effected in this country through the ballot box alone. Without protest and direct action, women would not have the vote, and racial segregation would still pervade the South. Too many Americans have forgotten how to speak up when the system fails them. The current protests were inspired, in part, by the images we saw on our TV screens of massive demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt. It is a sad day when Americans need the Middle East to remind them how democracy works.
I was living in Kazakhstan when protests in neighboring Kyrgyzstan turned violent. My Kazakh colleagues said I was lucky to be in a stable country. Indeed, Kazakhstan's stability is a matter of national pride. But that stability comes from 20 years of stifled democracy.
Neither extreme is desirable, but democracy is not meant to be stable — it's meant to be dynamic and changing. Democracy lives in the streets. Silent streets are the canary in the coal mine of stagnating democracy. Today the streets are not silent: Wall Street isn't silent; Main Street isn't silent; Gervais Street isn't silent.
As they say on the picket line, "This is what democracy looks like."