“How can the Occupy movement not touch a chord? Put plainly, there is something completely screwy about a society in which, to take a current Canadian example, airline attendants, some of whom barely make $50,000 a year, are being challenged on their legitimate right to strike while, as Toronto Life magazine recently reports in its hot-off-the-press Who Earns What issue, certain fund managers in Toronto raked in salaries up to $34-million last year. Is what they are doing so exponentially more valuable than everyone else?

The real value of the Occupy movement is that it could help mark an end to the apathy and loneliness of people who feel economically disenfranchised.

There is also the challenge of how to keep the movement focused and peaceful. Nightmare visions of the June 2010 G20 magnum-force police pushback or even, God forbid, Kent State are easy to conjure when you think of rolling demonstrations and each city stepping up its own law-and-order agenda.

It may peter out as the weather gets cold, it may self-destruct because of its unwieldy structure, it may dissipate out of frustration, cynicism and despair.

But whatever happens as this good-natured but persistent street-level pressure for change manifests itself in Toronto and Vancouver this weekend, the Occupy movement is its own thing. Not your father’s sixties revolution, and not the Arab Spring.”

Judith Timson, The Globe and Mail

10/13/2011