Back in my early twenties, during a visit to see the family, I was watching the news. One item particularly incensed me. It seems that twenty years previously a large company had known about, but had done nothing about, severe carcinogens in their building that had caused a number of employees to develop cancers, tumors, and the like. An class-action lawsuit had resulted, as those affected by the company's intransigence sought redress. My opinion was forthright and uncompromising: sue those bastards out of business! Take everything they've got! Divide up what's left of the company (if anything) and give it to the plaintiffs. Sue, sue, sue! Punish, punish punish!
At that point my Dad interrupted my intemperate little rant, plainly fed up with his son's idiocy and thoughtlessness. Dad began making a series of points that, at the time, I found utterly irritating. That's because he was absolutely correct. Here's what he said:
- Sue the company into bankruptcy and the people who will be hurt are not the malefactors, but the shareholders. Most of those shareholders don't even know they own stock in the company; it is the result of their retirement accounts, or a mutual fund, or some other investment which could be as undramatic as a passbook savings account at their local bank branch. You're going to kick the bejesus out of somebody's grandma and grandpa.
- Sue the company into bankruptcy and nobody guilty of any wrongdoing will be harmed or punished. The irresponsible executives who gave the order to ignore the carcinogens are long gone, and in their place are executives who are trying their best to keep the company afloat while at the same time facing the firestorm of legal troubles.
- Driving the company out of business will penalize yet more innocent people, the employees. They will lose their livelihoods and quite possibly a lot more than that.
I didn't like hearing any of that, but at the same time at some deeper level of my yet-adolescent consciousness, I knew that Dad was right. A publicly-traded company is an accountable entity, but nothing is served by imposing ruinous settlements. Redress, yet. Revenge, no. There's no quick fix, no one-size-fits-all solution to such a situation.
Fortunately cooler heads than mine were prevailing and as far as I know the company remained afloat while the plaintiffs were awarded appropriate damages.
This comes to mind as I contemplate the current sprawl of Occupy encampments across the country. While I might have sympathized (a little) with the original idea—i.e., to inconvenience Wall Street types by keeping an in-your-face vigil right at their very doorsteps—the movement as a whole impresses me as ridiculous, impatient, unreasoning, and utterly disconnected with any sense of the issues at hand. Do those people really think that by living in tents in public spaces in Oakland that they are exerting even an iota of pressure on financiers who work a continent's width away? Do they think that any of those businessfolk care one way or the other whether the Occupy folks camp, march, protest, or starve? If their purpose has been to call attention to their grievance, they've done that. So why are they still there?
While the Occupy movement is doing nothing positive except to provide overtime to TV reporters, it is causing significant harm to the very people it professes to defend, i.e., the "99%". Because when all is said and done, Oakland has been required to absorb a serious financial blow that it can barely afford. Oakland's downtown teeters on the edge of becoming a no-man's-land slum, but a slight uptick in retail was pointing to some (wan) hope. Then the Occupy folks came along; now those businesses may be facing bankruptcy due to lost revenue. Oakland can't afford the million-plus dollars it has been obliged to spend already. And where does all that money come from? Not from the 1%. Nope. It comes from the tax base, i.e., the rest of us.
The Occupy people remind me of the folks who were protesting BART's police by causing untold problems for their fellow citizens by blocking BART stations. They were mad at the BART police so they went around kicking a bunch of little old ladies in the shins. That's not the way you do it.
As lyricist Alan Jay Lerner once pointed out, youth has many glories—but judgment is not among them. I am reminded of the (young) man who kept insisting to me that the only cure for our woes was a return to a hunter-gatherer society. His reasoning: studies have shown that hunter-gatherers need spend only a small amount of their time seeking out food. (I'm not sure which studies he was reading, but I have a feeling that his research was shallow.) It did no good for me to point out to them that hunter-gathering can not conceivably support current population levels, so that if we could somehow miraculously return to such a society, we would be condemning the better part of the human race to death by starvation.
Or the (also very young) man who was convinced that used cooking oil was the answer to our fuel shortages. After all, he said, people are always just throwing it away. Restaurants use a ton of it and just throw it away. All that free energy! As with my delusional hunter-gatherist, my young friend wasn't happy with me for pointing out that used cooking oil will inevitably become quite expensive if it really were to become a viable alternate fuel source. Probably a lot more expensive than petroleum products, in fact. His answer: the government would have to set prices. My answer: you really think that would happen with the influence that the oil companies have? They'd see to it that used cooking oil became pricier than liquid gold.
But never confuse such folks with the facts. Eventually I learned just to ignore them and let them get over their idiocy on their own, just as I got over mine.
So to the Occupy folks: go ahead, sit there. Camp. March. Bang on drums. I only hope that you don't all become victims of typhoid or tuberculosis or other such old-timey scourges that inevitably follow such encampments in time. Or, if you do drop dead of some nasty infectious disease, let us hope that the authorities had limited the epidemic to just your messy little camps, so the rest of us aren't obliged to recapitulate the pleasures of the 14th century thanks to your adolescent posturing.