Light On Dark Water

I must say I'm more amused than anything else by the protests.  This list of demands posted on the forum of what seems to be a semi-official site is very funny, at least until you consider that the person who composed it is quite serious. It reminds me of the most ludicrous political statements of the late '60s: free everything for everybody, all the time.  In fairness, the same semi-official site contains a semi-official Declaration which although naive and a little goofy at best does point out real problems. 

Richard Aleman of the Distributist Review is doing a smart thing: trying to direct the incoherent but not totally misguided distress of these mostly young people toward the distributist alternative to both socialism and corporate capitalism. Here is a flyer he's printed and, um, distributed at the protests.

The response of the non-Fox media to this has been interesting. The movement has some obvious similarities to the Tea Party. But unlike the Tea Party, it's being treated as a group of people who have something serious to say and deserve respect and perhaps sympathy. (I'm judging this by the stories that appear on Google News.) Whereas the standard news story about the Tea Party, especially in its early days, went something like "Hate crazy racist old white racist unhinged racist violent racist uncivil hate racist racist hostile racist old hate racist racist white troubling racist dangerous racist stupid hate racist disturbing racist crazy white white hate hate racist racist racist." 

Update: here are a couple of interesting things: a mildly amusing suggested manifesto (the last line made me laugh) and a surprisingly sympathetic view from the Financial Times. And: I can't believe I left the word "hate" out of my canned Tea Party story above. The oversight was brought to my attention by an Occupy Wall Street participant who contrasted his movement with the Tea Party by saying it was "not about hate." I have corrected it.