Even though I’ve been on the road for the last 2 weeks, I’ve been rooting for the Occupy Wall Street movement from afar. I know that I’m not the only one. At this point, 60% of Americans are in favor of stricter regulations of the financial industry, and I suspect a good chunk of them would like to take it even farther and demand large-scale reforms of what has proven to be a deeply broken system.
And yet, even as the protests spread from New York to Boston, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, even if organizers new and old try every trick in the book to raise attendance–even so, not everyone who is fed up with the current financial mess will show up. To some of the hyper-charismatic organizers I’ve met, this is appalling; personally, though, I think this is pretty okay. Don’t get me wrong, I really hope that the protests get bigger and bigger until something is done. However, not showing up to a protest is not necessarily a matter of laziness, apathy, or cowardice. More likely, it is because of busy schedules, living too far from a protest zone, a dislike of crowds, trepidation about attending alone, or just the simple fact that not everyone is cut out to be a protestor. In fact, if everyone actually left their jobs and started protesting, we’d probably be in an even bigger mess than we are right now. But just because people don’t come to a protest doesn’t mean that they don’t care! There are a lot of ways to express anger and thirst for change that don’t involve posterboard.
So say we get a whopping million Americans out on the streets protesting–that’s still only 0.03% of the American population! What about the other 59.97% who still stand in solidarity but don’t show up in person? As Alexis Ohanian points out in his rousing defense of “slacktivism” (starts at about 8:30), these folks are the reasonable mainstream whose opinions shape the status quo. If we want to effect change, we’ve got to present them with ways to participate, to act from home, and to show people where they stand on the issue. In this case, we’ve got to show people how to put their money where their hearts are.
That’s why I’m asking that people more knowledgeable than me–organizers, economists, people-who-read-a-lot-of-WSJ–who support #occupywallst start assembling accessible, pragmatic educational materials for the general public. A large part of the oppression of the current financial system stems from lack of financial literacy in large portions of the population, and this has to be fixed if the movement is to sustain itself. Let’s help people figure out where to move their money if they don’t want to support big banks. Let’s create easy-to-parse infographics that pinpoint legislative loopholes. Let’s make socially-responsible investing a household term.
Vilifying Wall Street and exposing its rotten practices are a good start, but we need to disseminate ideas about a better future. Let’s show everyone, especially those of us playing along at home, what simple decisions they can make to help put this financial crisis behind us.
