All right, a few observations (and, of course, my opinion):
First of all, the “99%” are most certainly not the 99%. They are not representative of it, they don’t look like it, they don’t sound like it, they don’t share its politics.
The reality is that the OWS “99%” wishes it was the voice of the 99%, and its movement has a distinct mission to “wake up” the apparently slumbering 99% and move those folks into their column (yes, it sounds exactly like Marx and the “fale consciousness” schtick. Calling itself the “99%” is really just a snappy marketing move - if you had to crystallize it, I think a better label would be “We are the 99% - the 99% just doesn’t know it yet”.
In truth, the protesters I met were garden variety left-wing oriented malcontents with, frankly, pretty radical politics. They did not hail from “flyover” country, they weren’t simply unemployed middle-class types who finally decided that they’d had enough.
The idea that somehow this OWS crowd has been some middle class crowd of disgruntled “regular guys” has been nothing but a projection by a number of people sympathetic to the movement who didn’t/don’t want it discredited because of its extremism.
Now, I found the people nice. They were passionate and clearly committed to a cause they genuinely believed in, which uniformly was the exorcism of capitalism. I didn’t run into a single “bad” character. In fact, most of the people I ran into were very interesting. Every person I asked a question answered me in good faith and was happy to explain their beef with the system, politics, whatever.
But, make no mistake, the OWS crowd is not the “slice of America” the hipsters have insisted.
