Occupy Wall Street: A Disgrace To Real Hippies Everywhere

Some of us at PTU got into a vigorous debate today about the merits of the "Occupy Wall Street" protest. While most of PTU probably agrees with the majority of what I'm about to write, I'll be fair and say that Bottle vehemently disagrees.


Take a look at the image above that this group has on their own Facebook page and it highlights the main problem with this movement: they have no actual idea what their goals are. The only goal seems to be to complain about every liberal issue all at once while sleeping in the street without showering. Of course there are problems with corporate domination of American politics along with lots of other important issues, but these people aren't going to accomplish anything the way they are going about this.


Unfortunately our generation has turned into a bunch of whiners who like to blame everything on someone else. How can someone living in the U.S. possibly compare the challenges and oppression they face to someone living under a dictatorship in the Middle East? How does anyone who contributes anything meaningful to society have time to spend a month sleeping in a park and protesting every random issue known to man? Sure life isn't fair, but unfortunately the new norm is to sit around and blame everyone else for your problems instead of putting in some good old fashioned hard work to better yourself and achieve real change.


The hypocrisy is also rife among this group. Probably the best quote I've seen that sums this up comes (surprisingly) from the usually left leaning NYTimes:

"One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?".


Now, let me say that I think many of the issues that some of these "protesters" want to raise are quite valid. We do need to make sure we are enough of a civilized nation that we don't let people die from a tooth infection because they don't have insurance. We have to think logically and objectively about how our actions contribute to and modify the natural climate change that occurs over time. Unfortunately it seems like many lazy wannabe hippies are taking advantage of these problems to have an "experience". Someone should tell them that is what Burning Man is for, real problems need to be solved by real leaders with clear goals and objectives.


This gets me to my final point, which is that these people can learn something from keeping it real hippies back in the day. They were able to set clear goals and contribute to meaningful outcomes such as the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. These modern day hipsters should take a lesson from the keeping it real hippies and actually get something done instead of blogging to their friends back in Kansas about the cool experience they had protesting nothing. Anything else is a disgrace to the original hippies they idolize.