Forum Post: Need to interview a member of the movement for my sociology class!
Posted 12 years ago on March 11, 2012, 2:16 p.m. EST by Sumeet724
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Hey guys would anyone be willing to answer the following questions? They are part of an interview for a project on OWS that I am working on for my sociology class thanks!
When did you get involved with OWS?
What were your motivations for joining?
Did you join with any other people?
As part of the 99%, do you believe in all of the grievances against the 1%?
How would you define Occupy Wall Street: as a social movement or a simple protest?
What do you think is the future of the movement?
A lot of people who look at OWS from the outside see it as people simply protesting for no real cause. What are your thoughts on this assumption?
What do you think was the most important reason behind the movement gaining national and international attention?
What has the movement accomplished so far and which do you think is the most important
1) I first got involved in this around Columbus Day weekend (Oct. 8-11)
2) I wanted to get involved in OWS because I saw in it the potential to reshape our political and economic landscape. For the first time in a long time there were large groups of people standing up and saying in unison that the 2008 crash shouldn't have happened and that the people responsible for the crash needed to be called to account for the damage to this country. Even more importantly, that first discussion about the crash began to expand into a much larger reevaluation of the past thirty or so years of economic and general domestic policy, and no matter what the results of that wider discussion turn out to be the discussion itself needed to happen. I wanted to involve myself with OWS in the hopes of becoming a part of that wider discussion, taking in as much information and as many ideas from different sources as I could and eventually being in a position to contribute information and ideas of my own.
3) No; I joined by myself.
4) It's not really as simple as 99% vs. 1% (although I have to applaud the guys who thought up that slogan; it's catchy as all hell); it's more about a general culture of "anything goes" in the private sector and the policies given birth to by that culture (outsourcing, tax cuts for the wealthy, excessive deregulation, etc.) That culture is destructive, and the policies that have grown from that culture need to be reversed to the greatest degree possible. Those who have championed these policies at the expense of the national welfare need to be called to account and restitution needs to be made to those who have lost out thanks to these policies.
5) It started out as a simple protest and when it was at its peak it had swelled into a full-scale social movement. Since then, I honestly don't know what it's become. It seems much more fragmented now than it used to be, and I'm not sure whether it's going to regroup or come back in another form this spring and summer or whether it's spent itself for good.
6) See my answer to #5: I honestly can't tell right now.
7) I would disagree with that assessment. OWS as a whole may not be completely sure what specifically it's protesting, but I would argue that that's merely a testament to the magnitude of the crash of 2008 and the degree of restructuring that it is necessary to consider if we want to clean this mess up efficiently. It's complicated and long and messy enough that it's often far easier to protest ALL the things than it is to unravel all the different pieces of what's going on and develop coherent policy solutions for our country.
8) I'm with Pujete on this one; nothing gets you quite the same degree of publicity as police beating and pepper-spraying people of all ages and races en masse.
9) The biggest thing I think OWS has accomplished thus far is returning the language of income inequality to the national vocabulary. The 99%-1% thing has become an ascended meme at this point and Glass-Steagall became a buzzword for a while.