From The Best American Magazine Writing 2012: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests by Matt Taibbi

“People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world.”—Matt Taibbi

One of the more inspiring and effective relief efforts to emerge in the wake of Hurricane Sandy has been Occupy Sandy, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Undoubtedly, they’ve changed some skeptics’ minds who were wary of the movement’s seeming lack of specific demands.

One such skeptic was noted journalist Matt Taibbi. However, as he explains in How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests, included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2012, Taibbi saw the value in the movement’s desire for something different than the current corrupt economic system even if this was not articulated in a 10-point-plan.

In the following excerpt, Taibbi describes how he came to see the police, who had been deployed to monitor the protestors, as a symbol for larger problems:

The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It’s not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It’s that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they’re out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It’s about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a “beloved community” free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.