Letter to the editor

Andrew Greiner’s Sept. 21 opinion article in the IDS about the Wall Street protests is nothing but a hypocritical cynic’s attempt to justify his unwillingness to take action in the face of massive unemployment and poverty in the wealthiest nation in the world.  

Andrew commends “the protestors for attempting to make their voices heard by the giants of American business,” but according to him, “They don’t have the numbers to warrant action.”

Apparently, the only people who have the numbers to warrant action are the wealthiest 1 percent of this country who are profiting from this disgusting situation of global inequality.

According to Mr. Greiner’s logic, the rest of us should sit by in a debilitating coma of passivity while our country and economy are taken away from us. But for all of our sakes, I won’t go into the extremely complicated mathematics necessary to calculate who has the numbers to warrant action.

Andrew claims that “in the end, the only people talking about this in a few months will be employees reminiscing at the company Christmas party.”

My question for you, Andrew, is why? My guess is that those of us who sit by, condemning the protests, lack of tact from our pedestals of knowledge will be the biggest reason why.  

According to Mr. Greiner, we should be suspicious of these protests because they were spurred on by an anti-consumerist Canadian magazine. Leaving Andrew’s implicit nationalist bigotry aside, he can’t seem to comprehend the fact that we live in an increasingly globalized society, with economic and political decisions made in New York and Washington, D.C., having an undebatable ripple effect throughout the world, resulting in global austerity measures, attacks on the public sphere and ever-increasing economic inequality.  

Another issue is Andrew’s disparaging of the protesters’ decisions about their courses of study in college. Apparently, those of us who don’t choose to suck as much money out of a system that exploits the majority of the world’s population don’t deserve to complain; we should have known better.  

—Mike Kovanda