Occupy London: A Snapshot

This is the little girl that spoke to the masses

Since the dawn of the Arab Spring the world has erupted with the spirit of protest. With one of them: Occupy London, at my back door, I couldn't resist the opportunity to get to the bottom of this worldwide phenomenon. 

I spent two days at St. Paul's to try and gain an understanding of the Occupy movement. To find out for myself and not through hear-say, the media and rumour. 

Tents were outside the entrance of St. Paul's. Contrary to what I'd read, many tents were occupied and there were a few tired heads trying to rest amidst the chatter of excitement in the square.

The people that attended were of all shapes, sizes, creeds and colours. Most social groups seemed well represented. Although It was a combination of disenchanted university graduates and those in the counterculture of the 60's that probably formed the meat of the numbers.

Consumer Politics And The Death Of Idealism

We live in the age of consumer politics, where business and politics hold an inseparable power over our lives. In this time, have we come to a point where we have become tired of  both left and right politics? Through our realisation that neither wing has been able to implement change? Has power become stagnant and run out of ideas?

Recently I watched a series of documentaries by Adam Curtis called “All watched over by machines of love and grace” In it he describes how human beings have lost their profound ideological visions and now treat society as a process of maintenance. He believes this has been implemented by the computer age as those with power see people as statistics within a mechanical system. He believes that politics no longer holds profound, idealistic visions of the future but is instead pre-occupied with making the slightest changes to the present. In UK politics people have been saying for years how the Labour and Conservative parties have moved increasingly towards the centre; so Curtis's theory that we no longer idealise, but maintain, could probably be said for the government of my country at the very least.

A letter for equality

We are all influenced by the distortions of the media. Recently I found myself affected by the reportage of the London riots. I've observed how so many have risen up in anger, some when influenced by the media, against the “underclass” that they feel is responsible for the damage. I have also witnessed recently how both media and politics have been colluding in serious corruption. The media is how we all keep informed of world events. Yet it now acts as the mouthpiece of politicians, and is biased by the ownership of the big businesses that own the world's media giants. It is important to remember that because of these biases in the media that the demonisation of the working class has always been inherent in U.K society and therefore our institutions. The government itself has waged financial and rhetorical war on the poorest parts of our society. Yet it this belief that the underclass is separate from us, our values and our way of life that has bred the calls for tougher punishment. We must view our society as one organism. If one area is sick we do not punish it, but heal it. The day we acknowledge that these behaviours are a a product of the society we have all created and take responsibility for the whole, will be the day that this “broken society” will be fixed.