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What They've Come to Find at Occupy Wall Street Is America October 5, 2011 at 1:16PM by Charles P. Pierce
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/occupy-wall-street-demands-6506089#ixzz1d9TSeFtL
NEW YORK — Sal Cioffi and Randy Otero are union electricians from Local 3 of the IBEW in New York. They're working on the Freedom Tower a few blocks over in lower Manhattan. Over the past couple of days, they've taken to having their lunch in Zuccotti Park, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have set up camp here. The event has grown sufficiently that it's now attracted almost as many food trucks and mobile falafel units as it has television-news trucks, so there's always some place for Sal and Randy to buy lunch. So they park themselves on the stone bench, put their hard hats on the ground and, almost organically, they become part of the event. "We've had demonstrations, and it never makes the news," says Sal. "We could have 10,000 workers demonstrating, and it won't make the news. At least, something like this, they get the publicity." "We had a rally for the workers, two months ago, and we marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were people crossing that bridge for an hour-and-a-half, and it didn't hit the news," Randy adds. "All organized labor, no press coverage whatsoever. "Now, this here, they're not leaving, so the media has to cover it. And it's very close to Ground Zero, and once the police get involved, they have to cover it."
"They're waiting for someone to do something wrong," Sal says. What the two of them have found for themselves, here amid the guitars and the drums, and the indistinguishable forms shifting in their sleeping bags against the advancing autumn chill, is a public space for ideas. If the primary criticism of the ongoing demonstrations is that they seem to lack, as a hundred media reports have put it, "a cohesive public message," that is also one of their great strengths. This is a very loud and clear yawp against the irresponsible use of power by unaccountable institutions, including, increasingly, the government itself. The protests here are omni-directional. They appear inchoate because their target is so diffuse — an accelerating sense in the country that there is no pea under any of the shells, that the red Jack is not in the deck, that the wealth of the country is being swindled and gambled and frittered away by so many people in so many ways that to sharpen the focus on one of the long cons is to let a dozen others reach fruition. This is a protest about declining wages and corporate greed, about baroque financial schemes and the unfathomable fine print on the back of your credit-card statement, about a grand critique of mutated capitalism and outrage at the simple tragedy of foreclosure fraud. So, for today, Sal and Randy are sitting on the stone bench and talking about the life of a union electrician in New York City in 2011 and, in what they say, there is the shadow of all these other things, waiting for one slip, one accident, one missed paycheck. Except for the very few, economic survival in America is a fragile, perilous journey over an increasingly narrow road. That's the cohesive public message here in the park, if you can see past all the dreadlocks and hear it over the drum circles, which most of the mainstream coverage of this event has been sadly unable to do.
Remainder of Article:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/occupy-wall-street-demands-6506089#ixzz1d9TFbiMf
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Looking forward to The Dead Singing The National Anthem At The World Series.
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Fairly Sober Article On OWS in Esquire - 
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