The things we protest say a lot about us.
In New York, protesters “occupy” Wall Street. In a chaotic and striking scene, thousands of young Americans have simply camped out in New York City.
They’ve been there for two incoherent weeks now, and they don’t seem eager to leave.
The protesters know little. They know they are angry. Most are young and jobless — part of a generation that has some legitimate complaints about the way the economy is working out for them.
But the Occupy Wall Street throng shows a characteristic failing of the Millennial mind: Our trauma is automatically worthy of aimless, unfocused, but increasingly vehement protest simply because it happened to us.
It’s surely too much to ask for us to bear up stoically under the weight of this economy; it’s even more impossible to expect us to work, as generations before us did, to better our condition, even if we don’t get everything we expected out of our economic life.
But ask us to camp out together to the applause of the media and to just enough disapproval by the cruel, unfeeling government — well, that we can do.
Meanwhile, in Iran Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani faces execution for renouncing the Muslim faith of his family.
Nadarkhani could be put to death at any moment. Government authorities, concerned with appearances, now claim that he is also a traitor, a Zionist, and even a rapist. The government authorities brazenly lie.
If you’re thinking about protesting something, think about this. This is what real theocracy looks like. This is what an unjust capital sentence looks like. This is worth protesting.
In China, millions of families are restricted to one child.
If China is too far away to resonate with Americans, political and religious freedoms are brutally and systematically deprived just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
The reactions of angry governments to Arab Spring movement showed the consequences of protest in true authoritarian states.
Yet we congratulate ourselves for our historic and unprecedented activism against corporate profits and the unfairness of the American economy.
The Iranian pastor’s story — and those of millions of Cuban and Chinese citizens — doesn’t fit in anyone’s narrative.
It’s not a story about corporate greed, or the rights of a loud minority, or the injustice of our economic system.
It’s just a story about how there is evil in the world. Not just intolerance, and racial insensitivity, and greed and selfishness, but evil.
Maybe we feel we can protest American flaws because they uniquely affect us. But maybe our willingness to protest American flaws actually reveals something desperately wrong with our perspective.
If what we protest reveals the seriousness of our culture, in our willingness to whine about our economic future like we have nothing better to do, we show ourselves to be profoundly childish.
Americans should be better than this.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
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