WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR

Critics of Occupy Wall Street have a transparent objective: They want to persuade blue collar whites and ordinary middle class Americans to turn on the movement for cultural reasons — because its optics offend these voters’ cultural instincts — even if they broadly agree with its general principles and critique of what’s gone wrong.

This dovetails with a quote from John Cole I recently posted here (to much rending of garments and clutching of pearls from the very people he’s talking about):

“The greatest hoax of the last couple of decades has been the ability of the right wing to co-opt members of the struggling lower middle class and lower class and pretend they speak for them while enacting policies that enable the super-rich. They’ve used wedge issues like gay marriage and abortion and the baby Jeebus to alienate folks from their own economic interests, feeding them a steady diet of hatred of minorites, the educated, science, and, well, reality to create a voting block of people so guided by hatred of the ‘other’ that they would crawl over broken glass to cut their nose off to spite their face.”

I just posted that quote from Cole on my G+, and the self-identified conservatives are livid about it. I don’t mean this as an attack on self-identified conservatives at all. I quote it because it breaks my heart.

And not that it matters, but the same thing can largely be said of Democrats since the election of 2000. I strongly believe that if Obama and the Democrats had behaved like the populists they claimed to be when they had majorities in both houses of congress, and actually done something to hold these Wall Street criminals accountable, #OWS wouldn’t be necessary.

Now we just have to hope that the #OWS protests capture enough attention for long enough to force the Democrats (because you can be damn sure it won’t be the GOP) to enact laws and policies that actually address and correct the things we’ve all been begging them to listen to for about ten years.

This is how a movement gets started, and it doesn’t end quickly or cleanly. 

And it isn’t the job of the protesters to write the damn laws; that’s the job of the Congress, who need to work for The People instead of The Lobbyists.

  1. ellaminnowpea reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  2. betsybaby reblogged this from wilwheaton
  3. rolandofeld reblogged this from wilwheaton
  4. humboldtoctober reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  5. artmotherfuckers reblogged this from wilwheaton
  6. afractalparticle reblogged this from wilwheaton
  7. itsafunnyworldoutthere reblogged this from silas216
  8. silas216 reblogged this from wilwheaton
  9. momentoannette reblogged this from speakerwiggin
  10. kwveyn reblogged this from twelvebats
  11. atwas reblogged this from wilwheaton and added:
    I don’t think I have anything more to add…
  12. lovewillfuckusapart reblogged this from wilwheaton
  13. tachyonsareweird reblogged this from wilwheaton
  14. clevergenius reblogged this from sheercleverness
  15. jasinjawsh reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  16. theresapattern reblogged this from stfuconservatives and added:
    Right, because there are no valid criticisms of OWS.
  17. sheercleverness reblogged this from dederants
  18. dederants reblogged this from wilwheaton and added:
    This NEEDED to be re-blogged.
  19. seabiscuit-the-impaler reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  20. weinourordinariness reblogged this from wilwheaton
  21. dannydeadhack reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  22. becaolivetree reblogged this from wilwheaton
  23. calligrafiti reblogged this from fyrdrakken
  24. lojikam reblogged this from andrewadjei
  25. bethasaurus reblogged this from stfuconservatives
  26. fyrdrakken reblogged this from wilwheaton
  27. jimrehs reblogged this from wilwheaton
  28. iamthetwelfthdoctor reblogged this from wilwheaton
  29. soylenth reblogged this from wilwheaton
  30. bigdirkmalone reblogged this from wilwheaton
  31. emleng93 reblogged this from wilwheaton