Few share our privilege, power and freedom – hence responsibility
The movement, Rowe said, “stands for everything I believe in. I’m exhausted. I got rained on. I was cold, but I can’t seem to pull myself away.”
–Patrick Rowe, 48, a carpenter from New Jersey who joined the movement after stumbling across the activists while in the city on a job 11 days ago.
How do you break through the inertia, fear of embarrassment, isolation and aversion to doing anything different that surrounds most middle-class Americans like a moat?
–Gary Kamiya on the needed ad campaign to swell the ranks of Occupy Wall Street, and why the Situationists are the people for the job
The neohipster is a grotesque perversion of the original. If he fetishizes and hybridizes the cultural costumes of old hip—borrowing from the Beat poet, the jazzman, the rapper, the skater, the punk—it is only as a mockery of authentic anti-authoritarian countercultures. The neohipster is a creature of the advertisers: affluent and status-anxious, which means that he is consumerist and, in the manner of all conspicuous consumers, conforming to the demands of narcissistic chic.
-Christopher Ketcham, in The Reign of the One Percenters: Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City