„Whenever a writer considers endorsing a cause—whenever this writer considers it, at any rate—he worries: Do I know what I’m talking about? Am I distracting myself from my real work? Who cares what I think? Aren’t I just indulging a romantic sense of my own world-historical importance? Shouldn’t the cobbler stick to his last? Maybe. And maybe the movement will disappoint me by taking a nasty turn. I didn’t marry Occupy Wall Street; I just signed a petition supporting it. I think I did so as a kind of public recognition that my first impression of the movement has so far turned out to be more accurate and useful than my second thoughts. I signed in hopes of forestalling, or at least slowing, the impulse that other people might also feel to dismiss the movement out of hand.
Will Occupy Wall Street grow into a Tea Party-style political organization on the left? I suspect not, because its methods are too anarchist. Will it force the government to enact laws that regulate financial institutions more strictly or restrain the political power of corporations? Not while Republicans control the House of Representatives. But nothing concrete or lasting was achieved by the Bonus Army of American veterans who encamped in Washington, D.C., in 1932, or by the British workers who protested their unemployment and poverty by marching from the small town of Jarrow to London in 1936. All that those earlier protesters managed to do was add new voices to the political conversation. That alone wouldn’t be a small achievement.”