Not as fun as I'd thought. Fewer people than I expected, maybe 30 or 40. They spent most of the hour or so I hung out arguing about whether to move and, if so, where to.
Some wanted to camp out some place where pedestrians would see them and have to interact. Like Wall Street.
But this is Kansas City, and unless they're going to occupy the parking lot at a mall, they're going to be disappointed in the foot traffic. 99.9% of Kansas Citians don't walk anywhere except to and from their cars.
People would put up their hands to speak, but as soon as a recognized speaker started up, the interruptions were immediate, followed by interruptions to the interruptions along the lines of, 'Is this respectful? Is this what we're doing?'
Followed by even more earnest threats to quit, that, 'If this is what we're going to do, I'm out of here.'
It was frustrating to me on many levels, well beyond the fact that the only thing more annoying than someone running a meeting by Robert's Rules of Order is a meeting that desperately needs Robert's Rules or nothing can even be said. I've been as obnoxiously earnest as anyone in the park, and I've wanted to end the Fed since the 1980s. I just don't see this protest being effective. It's all emotion and no solution.
I don't mean to trash these protesters, some of them may not get the fundamentals of economics, but it's not like they'd learn that shit in school or in the mainstream press. They're out there for a good reason: many of them don't have the jobs their college degrees were supposed to secure because they had the bad fortune to graduate during the Second Great Depression which they did little to cause and are powerless to cure.
Everyone is hurting except, it seems, the handful of folks most responsible for it. Some of these elites complain about their lot, but be serious. It's lonely at the top, but there's plenty to eat and the lights stay on.
Protesting 'corporate greed' is like marching to end hurricanes or earthquakes. Corporations don't exist for some hippie-dippy set of ideals, they exist to make money and they should. Given a clear profit-based mission they generally only fuck up a little bit and almost always have to put at least a few knotty logs on the community wood pile in the process.
The Federal Reserve, fiat currency, central banking, and 'stimulus' spending, on the other hand, is worth protesting. A bunch of kids hanging out in a park is not really an occupation and doesn't require anyone to take them seriously.
Listen up: a system built on robbing Peter to pay Paul is not going to fold up because you hold up a sign that states the obvious about Paul's failings. And Paul is going to get his PR people way out ahead of you to make sure everyone knows that Peter wouldn't even have something to steal if it weren't for Paul.
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