- Making "Losing" Into "Winning"

Just as a thought experiment, let’s try to imagine what we could give the OWS crowd that would make them declare victory and go home to their parent’s basements.

Since many of them are professional demonstrators, there really isn’t much of anything that we could give to that group. I suppose we could agree to suspend elections, impose martial law, and replace our free market economy with one where top down controls are absolute. But while that would make the professional protesters happy, it would leave all the empty headed ‘pure democracy’ idiot college students ‘down twinkling’ at each other because they would be in the same boat they’re in now.

How about this. In spite of the way that big media is promoting them the crowd hasn't really expanded beyond a fringe group of professional community organizers, college kids, and street people. So there are still few enough of them that we could probably just buy them off. Pay their student loan bills, give them do nothing jobs in the department of environmental approval process planning or some such, and let them retire at 36 with 200K per year pensions and free medical care for life. That would do it.

But the community organizers and professional protesters already have jobs. They could have taken positions in the bureau of departmental regulatory grant application management, but they thought it would be more fun to be professional rabble rousers instead. When they are teaching the idiot college kids how to be dead weight as the police try to pick them up or taking their turn in the drum circle, they’re doing their jobs. Creating mayhem is what they’re all about – and being bought off may feel like a failure to them. So that won’t do it either.

The truth is, there is really only one thing we could do that would make them all happy. If we really want to make all of the OWS crowd celebrate, then the thing to do is to drag Lloyd Blankfein out of his upper east side townhouse, dress him in horsehair, tie his hands behind his back, kneel him in front of the crowd and allow them to pelt him with refuse for a while, and when the mob finally reaches it’s crescendo of righteous anger, guillotine him. Afterward you could stick his head on pike in the Trinity Church graveyard as a warning to other people who dare profit from…. from whatever horrible thing it was that Lloyd Blankfein actually did.

Obviously we couldn’t’ do anything like that – this is just a thought experiment after all. I’m just trying to make a point. And that point is this:

At the end of the day, there isn’t anything you can do for these people to make them happy. As much as the media portrays them as a noble movement full of good intentions and justifiable anger at the injustice of the capitalist system, their actual demands and desires are profoundly immoral. What they want is money they don’t deserve, power they don’t deserve, or the blood of innocent men whose only guilty act has been to achieve more than they have. What they want is to use the power of government to have themselves declared winners, even when they haven’t earned it.

They were given the rules the same of the rest of us, and made choices that lead to their failure. Now they want to blame others and somehow compel the government to suspend the rules. They want to be declared winners. But they aren’t. They’re losers. And even thought they lack the character to admit it to themselves and others, they have come by that loss honestly.

The best thing we can do is wait for the winter NYC wind to blow across Zucotti park (and let me tell ya – come February I’d rather be in Minneapolis) and they will all decide that being a loser in their parents basement is better than freezing their noble a$$es off down on Wall Street.