“Get a job.”
It is a common refrain heard from detractors of the “Occupation” protests that have proliferated exponentially around the world in the last month and a half.
It is, of course, an easy thing to say to a group of disaffected, disenchanted young people who see their prospects to make something of themselves after spending 16 years of their lives (more, in the case of those chasing Masters degrees and PhDs) in school slowly dwindle down to nothing.
It is even easier to make this intellectually vacuous argument if the only available description of the Occupation protests comes from media that uses the language of the 20th century to describe an entirely new movement.
Peaceniks. Hippies. Potheads. Burnouts. Losers. Bums. Leeches.
Youth unemployment stood at 51 percent in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the highest unemployment rate among young people the BLS has recored since 1951, the year it started keeping track of such things.
The official unemployment rate among the recently unemployed stands at 9.1 percent. This number does not take into account people who have had to drop out of the workforce, those who are underemployed and those who are no longer counted as unemployed because their benefits ran out.
If those factors were to be added in, the actual unemployment rate in the United States would look something like 16 percent.
So about that job.
The protestors occupying spaces at over 1,000 locations across the nation and around the world could stand to enjoy a little respect from those standing outside their experiment and laughing. They are not zoo attractions. They are not exhibitionist Situationist “hippies.” This is not a Democratic Tea Party.
In a draft study released last week by Dr. Hector Cordero-Guzman of the School of Public Affairs at CUNY-Baruch College, one in three respondents to a survey conducted on an official Occupy Wall Street website were older than 35. One in five respondents were older than 45.
Of the respondents, 50 percent were employed full-time; the other half was a mixture of part-time employees, disabled ex-workers, retirees and students. A full 13 percent were unemployed. Only 27 percent of respondents identified as party Democrats.
The report comes to a single conclusion: This movement that claims to be made up of the 99 percent “comes from and looks like the 99 (percent).”
It’s time for the media and everyone else to start actually paying attention to what is going on. It does no one any good to make sweeping generalizations about, or plan any sort of co-optation of, this movement.