Class Discussion OWS

After the discussion in class on Thursday I was somewhat disappointed to find out that the majority of our class didn’t know about the Occupy Wall street movement.  What's ironic is that the media painted the movement as a bunch of liberal college students when here we are in Vermont, a liberal state, in a college and most people don't know about the OWS movement.  Although I feel like I talked a bit too much in class on Thursday I think one point that we missed in the article is that the media probably distorted and under-reported on the OWS movement because the protesters themselves were against the media.  People like Rubert Murdoch who own major news networks like Fox and The New York Times lobby day in and day out for what the protesters are against, so it's a no brainer that media successfully implanted into our heads that the OWS movement didn't have a clear message.  It had very clear message, the 1% hold too much of our nations wealth hence the slogan, "We are the 99%".  The issue is that the solution is not clear.  In class we compared it to the egyptian revolution where the message was simply to get rid of Mubarak.  In the egyptian revolution the message and the solution was clear, but in the end there really wasn't a clear argument to be made.  Nobody really attacked the argument of the entire essay, we simply agreed that the message was not clear.  I didn't even think that much was correct.


Another item that I found surprising in class was how a lot of people in class didn't know how our political system worked.  To me, I thought it was a well known fact that the reason why politicians have 1950s values is because the majority of the voters have 1950s values; but in class I continued to hear arguments like, "Teenagers should vote because they would have swayed the vote".  When in reality, young voters have been voting less and less over the past 50 years.  I also found it surprising how people didn't believe when I said that the overall population is getting closer and closer to the center of the political spectrum when this was one of the first things I was taught in my US Government class.  I realize that saying this makes me sound somewhat like a stuck up asshole, and I don't really mean to sound like that as I definitely understand that other schools have different curriculum, but I was just surprised that it my school's curriculum was so uncommon.