Tea Party and Wall St Protests: Inherently Opposite

I, like the rest of the country now, am still absorbed in the coverage of the Occupy Wall St protest. As you may remember this event caught my attention from the very beginning and I was disappointed in the little coverage it received. But now even with the media circus going on, I am still unhappy. There is undeniably a lot of coverage in the media but the analysis is so basic to me. "Basic" is honestly the best word that I could come up with without insulting the many journalists who I know are now rigorously playing catch up in reporting this event. But honestly, all these comparisons with the Tea Party are simplistic at best. The Tea Party is a wing of the Republican Party; it always has been. While they have been portrayed as the angry renegade group, the Tea Party has never suggested a structural change of the our current political system. NEVER. What they have done is demand a return and a reinvigoration of the most conservative and parochial ideas this country has ever seen. They are reformists at best.

This is NOT the same as the Occupy Wall St. These people are not reformists. At least not from what I can tell. The change they ask for, the demand for more participation is in its very essence revolutionary. It is at its roots a denouncement of capitalism. And these days people seem to be equating being American with being Capitalist, a statement I will always strongly disagree with. The Occupation protests all over the country are spotlighting structural problems with our economic system and though they may not have the language to explain it yet, they want structural solutions. Naturally this is a strange idea to most people and unfortunately the media seems to be confused as to how to respond to it. But I don't blame them. This is a new idea at its core. One that is rarely given credence in the public.

Angered Journalist Speaks Up: Police Brutality on Wall Street

Men Set the Pace, But Women Draw the Race

The most intriguing sentence of the Belkin article to me was, "It might as well have been the 1950s, but with skimpier clothing, fewer inhibitions and better birth control. " In that one line there was both a brilliant observation, but also a dangerous assumption. While she seemed to ask "Are women any more equal in or outside of the classroom today than they were in the 1950s?" I was more interested in asking, "Who determines what 'progress' is within the women's movement for equality?" Is the way a women dresses to a college party an indicator of how far all women have come in the fight to be taken seriously. On the one hand, Belkin observed that her female students were at the top of the class and that they competed on par if not better than their male counterparts. But somehow once they stepped into the social realm of college life, their roles regressed and women somehow no longer could think for themselves.

While I thought the actions of the Duke fraternity students were despicable, I don't judge the women who showed up either. I cant speak for all women, but I can say that for my friends and I it's important to us to be dressed in a way that allows us to be both comfortable and confident when we go out. And many times that means being "sexy" (and we all have different definitions of what that means). But at the same time I think that we are all smart, driven and socially critical young women. And that DOESN'T change if we wear a skimpy dress to a party. We all know very well what men's intentions are when we are invited to a party. But we also know full well how we expect to be treated and what we will allow and what we wont. As Belkin says "men may set the pace", but women determine the direction and the course of the race. Feel free to challenge me but as young women we are subject to many social pressures, but part of becoming an adult is learning to know what you will and wont stand for. Belkin may just be observing women and men at that critical stage. Then the question becomes how do those same pattens of social behavior change once we enter the "real world"? Do they just disapper? I doubt it. But Ill let you know this same time next year.