Forum Post: Reaching the Suburbs

Here's a Youtube version of a film that was shown at a forum in support of Occupy Wall Street on Long Island on Wednesday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nRwlxd4KsNw#!

The audience was made up of about 300 hundred people, about 2/3s of whom were college students. I know that it's tempting to give up on the suburbs, but from what I've seen the more people understand the ideas behind OWS, the more they come around to support the movement. It's all well and good to "preach to the choir" but real change will only happen in this country when we can persuade those who now view the movement with some degree of suspicion--and many of those individuals like in places like Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester.

The great thing about the film was that most of the people who were interviewed were intelligent, articulate, politically aware men and women in their 20s, who were able to explain in clear and succinct terms exactly why they were protesting. Seeing these folks in action had an enormous impact on the suburban audience, who couldn't fall back on their usual stereotype of OWS protesters as bubble-headed, incoherent hippies with no clear vision for the country. There was even a generally positive write-up in Newsday, which is not exactly the most radical paper in the country.