Occupy Wall Street and the demand for demands

As the Occupy Wall Street movement sailed past its one-month anniversary last week, the calls for "specific demands" continued to bounce around the media echo chamber. 

What do they want? They need focus. They need leaders. 

Those are the paraphrased sentiments of the mainstream media who are looking to pigeonhole a movement that can't possibly be contained in the sound bite they so desperately desire. 

Simply put, a broad problem can only be answered with a broad solution.

It's taken a lot of years, effort and money for corporations to get the stranglehold on the government that they now hold -- on both sides of the aisle. And it could take exponentially more time and effort to reverse it because the primary currency we're working with is human suffering and outrage, which has proven far less effective in swaying politicians than cold, hard cash. 

In addition to wanting a simple message, many seem to be hoping for a leader, or at least a handful of names or faces, to step out in front of the movement as representatives. But anyone who takes that step would immediately become a target for the detractors, and will provide yet another distraction as their personal lives and backgrounds would become a new form of fodder. 

Nonetheless, the calls for clarity on the protesters' message seem to be ignoring the many signs, websites and the very clear list of grievances the group issued with unanimous approval from its general assembly several weeks ago. 

The "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City," which Keith Olbermann read on-air on the Oct. 5 edition of "Countdown," is strikingly detailed, especially given the apparent confusion over what they want. It's even packaged up quite nicely in a friendly list format. 

The problem is that the declaration took Keith four minutes to read, in full, and that's roughly twice as much time as your average newscast is likely to give to covering the movement. So it's easier and way more fun for those outlets to spend those couple of minutes making fun of hairdos, calling protesters unhygienic, or trying to compare the movement to the tea party. 

The media -- and, more importantly, OWS's detractors -- crave something simple that they can latch onto, mischaracterize and rip into shreds. We've already seen this with the over-simplified theory that the protesters "hate capitalism" and "want socialism." Perhaps some of them do hate capitalism and want socialism. But, while I can't pretend to speak for the group, I would guess that most of the protesters' beef with corporations is not that they make a profit at all, but that they've bankrolled politicians into re-writing the rules of the game so that they can make even greater profits at the public's expense.

Over the weekend, we asked in our "BFD (Big Featured Discussion)" whether OWS should give in to this demand for demands. The resounding answer was no, with the constant theme being that specific demands would only be used as a tool to minimize the movement. (See the many thoughtful and insightful comments here.) 

A user named poligirl summed it up quite nicely: "No, they don't need to make specific demands. This is about the whole system; it's broken."

It's just that simple. 

So, no, Occupy Wall Street doesn't need to make further demands. "We are the 99 percent" is not a policy position or a solution. It's a reminder to politicians about who they're supposed to be working for. And many of them appear to be hearing the message already.

Even if the numbers begin to dwindle at Zuccotti Park and every other Occupy location around the country as the cold winter approaches -- and there's no reason to believe they will -- the movement is already a raging success. In just one month, it has already changed the conversation. Polls are already showing support for the protests (39 percent, according to Pew, favor the movement that didn't exist 39 days ago). Politicians and CEOs are already starting to claim they empathize. 

It didn't take a strict list of demands to make this happen. It took a broad claim and an unflinching dedication to what is right. The unifying statement, "We are the 99 percent," is inherently nonpartisan. It is inherently non-ideological. It is inherently all encompassing.

Why demand anything more?

Victor Balta is the managing editor of current.com. 

Learn more about the Occupy Wall Street movement at occupywallst.org, and catch up on all of Current's coverage of the protests on our Occupy Wall Street blog.