Think the Occupy protesters are motivated by money or inequality? Geoff Colvin of Fortune disagrees. He labels “perceived injustice” as the “real root of today’s rage” among the occupiers and in other protest movements around the world.
The elements are the same in protests worldwide, whether the specific grievance is blatant corruption, as in China and the Middle East, or violation of the social compact, as in Europe. The innocent are punished while the guilty are rewarded. That combination is intolerable.
In the U.S. this narrative is flawed and in some ways plain wrong. Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters probably don’t know that they, as taxpayers, actually made money from the bank bailout. They may be forgetting that millions of Americans are being foreclosed on because they willingly, even eagerly, took out mortgages they couldn’t afford. Some protesters are simply clueless, like one who responded to a question from the New York Times by saying he’d never heard of Warren Buffett, or one who complained to NPR that “we’re paying for the bailout,” or one who told the Times that the airline Virgin America is a good company because it’s “working on creating solar planes.”
It doesn’t matter. What people know or don’t know isn’t important. All that counts is what they feel.
