Matt Taibbi's Article/Class Discussion Response

When I first learned about Occupy Wall Street, I’m going to be completely honest when I say I had no idea what it was at first. I knew it was some kind of protest, but I didn’t know what towards and the cause of it. Sure, I seemed naïve at first, but later I learned the bare minimum that it was about our economy and how people were finally fed up with it and this national movement was to make the banks do something about it. After reading Matt Taibbi’s “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests” and our in class discussion, I learned that there was so much more that Occupy Wall Street had to offer than to what meets the eye.

Again, when I first took an approach towards understanding Occupy Wall Street, I was like every normal college freshmen; we all know nothing about credit. And I make this analogy for specific reasons. Credit is something that in time you can learn, and yet it’s important in life that you know how credit works. I feel that this is in fact the same way as in Occupy Wall Street. It’s important to learn about the economy. We, as freshmen, will soon be entering this world where we must deal with “credit” and “the economy.”

My first look at really understanding Occupy Wall Street was actually what Taibbi said in his article, that “Occupy Wall Street [is] a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers.” I really thought it was just random people complaining about their lives.

After our class discussion and reading Taibbi’s article, I learned that it isn’t necessarily people who are fed up with the economy, but everything. “What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.” This gave me an entirely new insight on the movement.

In our class discussion, what I remembered the most was how our future is controlled by people who are older than us, and have the ability to vote and control how our future economy will be, and yet when it comes to it, we’re the ones it directly affects in the future. I hope one day they will give kids the power to vote. There are adults now that have no idea what they’re doing and their voting and it directly affects us. One day, I hope with Occupy Wall Street, us young adults will have the ability to make a difference in the world now, and not later for our future children.