Daniel Nichols sees OWS …

as a sign of Hope. I do too, just as I saw the Tea Parties as a sign of hope. Both are protesting basically the same things. Insofar as they are opposed to the evil of the incestuous relationship between Big Caesar and Big Mammon, they are right and deserve kudos for trying to figure out ways to oppose this.

Daniel writes:

President Obama and other Democrats are already trying to co-opt the Occupy movement, just as the Republicans co-opted the Tea Party, but you’d have to be blind to fall for that, aside from the few Democrats who do stand up for the working class. And the Occupy movement, with its emphasis on consensus and deliberate lack of leadership, does not look likely to offer practical means of structural change. But it’s early, and who knows? The time is certainly ripe for a third party.

No one knows where all this is headed, but when was the last time that there was any hope at all for critics of capitalism?

I answer that i am not so sanguine about the human capacity for blindness as Daniel. The Tea Partiers, after all, were blind enough to get co-opted by the GOP and made into a wholly owned subsidiary of the giant corp known as FOX News (not to mention Goldline and whatever Glenn Beck was hawking that week) so I have no trouble believing it quite possible–indeed likely–that the OWSers will find themselves skillfully herded by professional molders and shapers of human clay who run the Democratic party (and their willing accomplices in the media who do nothing but shape public opinion.) Give them time. The OWS folk remind me of Voice of the Faithful: rightfully angry but unfocused. I shall be very surprised if they don’t, like Voice of the Faithful, wind up as a clearing house for every manipulator with an agenda.

That Eeyorish opinion vented, I do nonetheless agree that OWS, like the Tea parties, is a hopeful sign. Particularly hopeful to me is the fact that the OWSers appear to be quite open to Chesterton and Catholic social teaching, which is always a healthy sign.