The Occupy Wall Street website states that, "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."
One of the most recent speakers was Slavoj Zizek, he spoke about North America's lack of dreaming, the issues with the system and the need for patience. Below I have summarized what I found most interesting from his visit.
In China the government prohibited all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel, this shows that citizens still dream about alternatives and that there is a need for prohibition. In the United States there is no need to prohibit such things as the ruling system has suppressed the capacity to dream. It seems that we have all the freedoms we want but are missing the language to articulate the extent of the current non-freedom.
The biggest threat to the movement is that when everyone goes back to normal life there will be no changes. That down the road, protesters will meet up yearly to remember the nice time they had, not the changes they have experienced.
It is imperative to think about alternatives, we know we are not living in the best possible world, but after understanding what we don't want, we need to figure out what we do want. One of Zizek's final points was that people often desire something but do not really want it. Citizens need to really want what they desire to make a significant change.
"We don't want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living."
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