Comparison to Civil Rights Movement

NATIONAL RAGE
awakening of a generation

"The Civil Rights protesters were vilified, misrepresented, called names, and even told by white people who sympathized with them that now isn't the time for a movement. They were seen as bad people because they were unruly, they didn't know their place, they supposedly had Communist sympathies, and they were clashing with police (or being beaten by them) and breaking the laws out in public." ---Yahoo

comment: "The civil rights movement was about equal rights regardless of who you are. OWS is about equal pay regardless of what you do."

Reflection:
People cut down Occupiers' credibility because they carry macbooks and got themselves into debt themselves – by making poor investments or knowingly paying for a college degree.

criticizing the symptoms is the wrong way to hit this movement as “not legitimate.” Those people are struggling for many reasons, some more legit than others. THere are always going to be people who abuse the system and make the legitimate complainers look bad, which is something that the some mainstream media did a lot of. [Fox, Occupy Unmasked?]

The occupiers should be working rather than occupying, living off their parents’ bank accounts? That is a copout. Students who can’t pay their student loans did knowingly apply for them, so they “got themselves into it.” They may come off as entitled kids who think the government owes them a handout. That does not mean that the government/the system/the “you must go to college to get a good job culture” does not need fixing. or that they should have saw it coming. It’s a problem they see that needs to be fixed. 

Technology has not changed our mindset; it only helps us be more effective active in what we THINK we can accomplish. This does not mean we're any better at changing the minds of those they oppose. There are still functional and logical obstacles to hurtle before that can be achieved (the answer must be reached for in a tangible way -- esp. for the government). 

What technology does is facilitate culture. It is merely an extension of our minds – as opposed to industrial times (pre Web 2.0) when machines were extensions only of our bodies. It has not changed our values, but hightened the speed at which we can empathize, plan, and execute. Good and evil are still opposing forces, and they come in new forms as time passes. 

Before network technology, we obeyed the hierarchy. Now, Occupiers have very little respect for the authorities that control government or banks. Transparency may be partly to blame for that, which came from our new ability to share ideas and informaiton on the Web. Americans in the "99%" created new expectations when they saw such big connections between their problems and money. Debt, education, home ownership. Money controls it all. And so the people blame the ones who control the money – the "1%".

Occupy is essentially an economic protest. Everything they argue about has to do with money – not necessarily a specific right. It just all leads back to those who control the wealth – hence the 99% vs. 1%. Haves and have-nots is a term of power more so than money. But it's about the ones who control the money and use it to influence/manipulate government. The SOCIAL issues that stem from there are still, at the root, financial.

"While the civil rights movement took up the cause of racial injustice, the Occupy movement has sounded the call for economic justice, Kathleen McQuillen, a member of the nonviolence group American Friends Service Committee said. “Perhaps that’s the last one to be brought forth in our society,” McQuillen said. “Not that there’s equality around races at this point, but we started that, and I think when we can bring forth economic justice than we can also bring forth a more racially equal society.” --Grant Rogers Iowa Caucus? DesMoinesRegister.com

Jesse Jackson: “Occupy is not about a place, but a space,” says Jackson, who is celebrating 50 years as a civil rights advocate. “It’s not about the place downtown but the inequality gap. Occupy is a spirit that cannot be pepper-sprayed.”

CRITICISM

Those who find beef with Occupiers or cannot empathize see them as entitled. It seems radical and offensive to them to compare occupiers to blacks from the civil rights movement. 1) Blacks were seen as second class citizens and faced real repression - denied rights explicitly (the issue here for empathy is that the Occupiers are not EXPLICITLY being denied any rights. They just know they have a problem and think they know who the culprits are)

2) "Probably the most important difference is that where black civil-rights activists were driven by a deep desire to be full, free, productive members of society, the occupiers have a deep disdain for the mainstream, or the “rat race” as they call it, for those hordes who cluelessly trudge to pointless jobs every day. Their posters and placards chastise Joe Public for being robotic, while graciously informing us that capitalism has turned us all into “chumps or tarts”. Where civil-rights protesters wanted in, the occupiers want out – they want to opt out of a society which in their minority middle-class view is too competitive and vulgar and stuff-obsessed. Consider the different clothing worn by the self-respecting civil-rights activist and the self-regarding occupier. The black marchers on Washington wore their Sunday best, suits and ties, to signal their respectability and desire to be part of society; the modern occupiers wear psychedelic leggings or fancy dress, to signal their scoffing disregard for the straights and squares who make up the vile mainstream world." ---- Telegraph, uk Brendan O'Niell