Welcome to the Occupation

There’s an excellent post over at The Downward Spiral about the people currently engaging in the protests at Wall Street. It notes that these are people of a certain generation, the one after Generation X, that have done all they were told to: they studied hard, they went to college, only to be told "ah, there’s no jobs, no money, so…erm, hard luck."

And to give those folk over in New York and elsewhere in the world their due, they’re doing something about it. It may turn out to be a futile gesture, but there’s always the hope momentum gathers. All of which gave me pause to thought, and what I did conclude was: "Hold on, this is my generation. Those are my peers, sort of, sleeping on the streets in protest."

See, I’ve always found it hard to connect with my own age group. Growing up, the three things that mattered to me were a) football b) computer games and c) music. With the first, nobody else at my school supported my team. The second involved not needing other people, in the main, and on the third, I took my cues from friends of my dad, who wisely steered me down the route of listening to the Smiths, Joy Division and Motown. They all seemed streets ahead of whatever the NME was pushing at the time.

But anyways: thinking about the whole "Occupy" movement and the possibility of the collapse of society into a kind of Mad Max scenario, I’m sorry to say the main thought that came to my head was "fuck, how am I going to play the latest Fallout game if there’s no electricity?" and began to run through the maths of how big a windmill you need on the roof to power a 32 inch TV and Playstation. Has to be that, as it’s not like you can go down the solar power route in Northern England. That’s not right, is it? A sense of perspective is desperately needed at times such as these.

All the same, it has been fun to see how the right-wing sections of the press react to this. They seem torn between dismissing people sleeping on Wall Street as a bunch of bums who need a wash and a job, but at the same time needing to discredit them before they grow into anything a tad more serious.

Which reminds me, to return to an issue I brought up the other week, of how amused I get when I see the word "Marxist" thrown around – I’m sure it would amuse old Karl to see that some thoughts he had 150 years ago can still cause ripples of fear amongst the great and good. More amused, I’m sure, than Eric Blair would have been to see the term "Orwellian" thrown around without due care by people whose knowledge of 1984 may have been gathered from skimming the plot synopsis on Wikipedia.