I have not been able to see these protests in person, being that I currently live in Korea, but from everything I've read about OWS in the news and from my friends' Facebook posts, it's essentially an impassioned mob of young people who are angry about the shitty and stagnant state of the US economy, the state of their livelihood (and/or the state of their friends' livelihoods) and want to lash out at someone or anyone who they think might be responsible for this mess we're in. And in this case that "someone" is the fat cats of Wall Street, because let's be honest, they are a pretty easy group of people to hate on.
Many have criticized Occupy Wall Street for being a movement with no unified purpose, one that will will inevitably peter out and die. Others have criticized OWS as being nothing more than an excuse for young, bored people to throw a huge party.
But if you ask me, personally I think all that is beside the point.
If you ask me, I think the most interesting aspect of OWS has been its ability to mobilize so many young people of my generation, traditionally the #1 most politically apathetic demographic of the past several decades. There are so many other things in the past two decades which could have (and should have) gotten young people just as angry and impassioned and out on the streets, but in the end it's the evil empire of banks which ended up doing the trick.
And I don't think this is any coincidence. I think a movement like Occupy Wall Street has been a long time coming. I think that what those protesters at Occupy Wall Street feel, is something that a lot of the rest of us "normal," less-angry people feel as well. Maybe for a long time we didn't quite know what this feeling was, but it's been simmering below the surface for years and years and is just now coming to a boil.
And that feeling is that the Finance industry is an industry that has spiraled out of control, has become grossly overcompensated relative to the amount of value it adds to society, and whose Day of Reckoning has finally come.
I believe "Occupy Wall Street" signals the end of an era. I believe that Finance is done as a "hot" industry whose time has come and gone.
In the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000's, Finance was probably the hottest industry to go to. People heard about the unbelievable salaries and bonuses that people were making in Finance, and many young, intelligent people who might have otherwise chosen to be professors, engineers, entrepreneurs, doctors, or whatever, they all opted instead to seek out the seemingly greener pastures of Finance.
If you take a given college class, there are typically always going to be lots of smart people with very diverse interests, who want to go into Medicine or Law or Academia or Engineering or Science. But suddenly in the 1990s Finance became THE hot industry to go to, and it started a flight of talent in which the Finance industry started taking in and siphoning off all the talented people who would have otherwise gone into another field which they had (until then) always interested them, had the irresistible allure of Finance not gotten to them.
Many of these people who had "crossed over to the Dark Side" to become investment bankers and traders, they tried to justify their actions by telling people (at least, those who would listen) as well as themselves about the social goods that the Finance industry provides. About how it provides liquidity to the markets, about how it makes the markets more efficient, and about how they provide efficient funding for large corporations which acts as the fuel for economic growth.
And that's all probably very true. Despite all the negative press that the Finance industry and the people who work in it have been getting these past few months, you can't deny its place in society. Just like we need a police force to protect our citizens, and we need hospitals to take care of our sick, we need the Finance industry for many things. We need financial institutions to keep our money safe, to lend money to individuals and corporations who hopefully can put it to good use and eventually pay it back and then some, and to invest our assets wisely so that we can have a nice nest egg waiting for us when we retire. And contrary to what people might have you believe, people in Finance are not all evil, greedy, blood-sucking, money-hungry bastards looking for ways to deprive innocent people of their hard-earned money.
As a result of all this, as we saw the Finance industry became overrun by greedy individuals who wanted to get rich without any regard for the end users of their products & services, aka their customers, and that's the point at which any industry will become derailed and eventually come crashing down, as the Finance industry finally has now.
There's a quote from my favorite movie that goes "When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural." The 2008 Financial Crisis and its aftermath were awful, but it was the "purging fire" that our society needed, to shake itself out of the strange Finance-driven bizarro world that it had made for itself. We've been through the worst of the fire, and while we are still feeling the after-effects, it will be much better for our society in the long-run. The "golden age" of the Finance industry is over, and over the next few years I believe we will slowly see a return to harmony when it comes to the future career aspirations of many young people.
My hope is that many smart and talented people will still go to Finance, but that the proportion of the smart people of the world who do go into Finance will return to a more reasonable and balanced level. The greatly-decreased glamour of the industry as a result of OWS-type public protests will ensure that only people who really want to do Finance and are truly "meant" to do it, will do it. The other people who went into Finance because it pays a lot and seemed cool, these are the types of people that in today's world will re-evaluate their options and choose what they really wanted to do, and I'm hoping that the world will benefit by the "better-late-than-never" choice that many of the current crop of talented 20-somethings are hopefully making. Because it's talented but misguided individuals like that who, in the absence of OWS and this public outcry against financial institutions, would have worked in Finance into their 40s and 50s and lived a relatively unfulfilling life as a result of not doing what they were originally meant to do and being unable to make the mark on society that they were supposed to make. But now they will be able to realize what it is they truly wanted to do in life, which for many people in Finance, probably is not and never was, Finance.
So that is my unconventional take on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I'm fascinated seeing all these young people of my generation taking to the streets to protest something that they feel was unjust and which the government has done nothing to address. And I'm hoping it helps to open the eyes of all the rest of the young people in the world and help them see that they don't have to "sell out" on their childhood dreams to pursue a potentially high-paying career which will bring glamour and wealth but may not bring what all people want, which is the genuine happiness that comes from knowing that you've made the world a slightly better place, when it comes time to leave it.
