#OccupyWallStreet—A Protest For All

It’s been nearly two weeks since thousands of people descended upon New York City in areas around Wall Street, occupying the nearby Battery Park in an effort to start a revolution of sorts—a revolution against excessive greed.

A large number of the protestors were young people.

Who says young people can’t start a revolution? Who says Twitter is just for Justin Beiber mega-fans and high school gossip?

Designed to be the young American’s spin-off of protests earlier this year in the Mideast, the Occupy Wall Street protest has made the splash organizers were looking for, both on and off social media.

Occupy Wall Street is the brainchild of Kalle Lasn, the publisher and founder of the counterculture activist magazine AdBusters, and is being supported by the hacking group Anonymous. The group not only has legitimacy but, clearly, an immense amount of street cred.

Lasn told CNN that the underlying reason and need for the protests is because leaders in the financial sector “had not been brought to justice.” The organizers’ inspiration came from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya earlier this year. And the rest is (or, they hope will be) history.

”We thought, why isn't there a backlash here?,” Lasn asked. “We need to shake up the corporate-driven capitalist system we're in. To do that, we needed something radical."

One protestor found out about the revolution through social media site StumbleUpon, which aggregates websites that fit with a user’s particular interests.

“I just really agreed that there's widespread discontent with the banks and corporations,” Josh Dworning said about his decision to put his life on hold and take the 24-hour bus ride from Florida to Wall Street. “I’m no crazy radical, just a student who believes in something.”

The issue here isn’t partisan politics. This protest is an action against a series of broken policies that favor Wall Street and not regular Americans. The protestors aren’t gathered as Democrats or Republicans—they’re gathered in the name of truth and justice.

And this isn’t the end; it’s just the beginning.

These thousands of “kids” who have showed up at Wall Street aren’t just sporting Che Guevara shirts for the heck of it and wearing masks for attention. They’re starting a revolution. We’re starting a revolution. It’s time to get on board.

Emily Wood is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow her on Twitter @em_nicole55.

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