The protests that began about a month ago in New York's Lower Manhattan have begun to appear in other cities around the nation. Media coverage has started to pick up also. People of various backgrounds are assembling on public places in major cities with various demands, and occupying them. Occupying, but for what?

I've spent some hours among the people that have gathered here at Dilworth plaza on the west side of Philadelphia's City Hall. And I spent several hours yesturday among those in Manhattan. And I've gotten some distinct impressions about the nature of the protests and the goals of at least some of the participants.

While it has been suggested that these gatherings lack organisation, that they are decidedly uncertain as to what it is they are trying to accomplish, I've gotten the impression that they not unorganised at all. In fact, ideologically speaking, at least in the places that I have visited, they have been decidedly leftist.

Besides the anarchists, those with leftist political leanings have been by far the most visible and vocal of any of the groups that I have seen. While other ideologies may be present, while there may be people there who have other agendas, those leaning to the far and extreme left are speaking the loudest and the clearest that I could hear.

Yesturday in Manhattan the famed Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek made an appearance and a speech. It was no longer than day two in Philly before I saw a table set up for the Socialists. And the signs are everywhere: down with capitalism. That's to put it in mild terms: the signs, some of them, are much more graphic and very much reminiscent of the revolutionay Marxism that I've read about.

If the goals of the group as a whole are ambigous I don't believe they are for what appears to me to be the unseen hand behind the demonstrations, a hand that may have been there from the start, or that has come just lately, opportunisticly. My money would be on the former possiblity as a probability.

If I had to guess, I'd say that those agents of the left that are working the crowds don't have any intentions of "winning" or getting any of the unspoken demands met before they are willing to pack up, break camp and leave. Stop the occupation.

My guess is that they have been accomplishing their goal from day one: that these events are being used as ideological recruiting grounds, that they are capitalising on the social and political unrest and the economic faliures of America to engage the public in a conversation, a conversation they can manipulate and control. In order to win more converts to Marx and his philosphical descendants.


As Christians we do not owe any allegiance to Capitalism. In fact, I've found alot of things that we can sympathise with among the protestors. They have legitimate complaints.

Some of their rebukes are spot on.

But of course, we know that every godless ideology is doomed. And man, apart from God, is inadaquate to solve his own problems.

In this sense, the charges being made from Wall Street to Main Street against American Corporate corruption are indictments against the masses of us as a whole. Greed knows no economic status. And corruption knows has no peculiar class status or basis.

The eminent British Statesman Edmund Burke said this which aught to be repeated at least once for every "this is what democracy looks like"*:

"The active men in the state are true samples of the mass. If they are universally depraved, the commonwealth itself is not sound. We may amuse ourselves with talking as much as we please of the virtue of middle or humble life; that is, we may place our confidence in the virtue of those who have never been tried. But if the persons who are continually emerging out of that sphere be no better than those whom birth has placed above it, what hopes are there in the remainder of the body which is to furnish the perpetual succession of the state?"



That said, and all of our political differences aside, both within and with the left, one thing is certain: we have an opportunity at these events, to join the conversation.


If we do, may it be with God's wisdom.




*"this is what democracy looks like" is a mantra of sorts among the protestors at Philadelphia. The founders left to us a Representative Republic, not a Democracy.

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Christopher Joel Dandrow