Jon Stewart on "Occupy Wall Street"

I haven't really been able to piece together my thoughts on the growing Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, and I'm certainly not alone. The difficulty in assessing this situation/movement/protest is that we all want it to be some cohesive, coherent, easy-to-categorize group, when in reality it's anything but--and that's exactly what makes it so important.

The fact is, the people of the Occupy Wall Street movement are exactly what they say they are--the "other 99%". And since we know that 99% of people can rarely agree on anything (the closest we've been able to get is, ahem, 89%), it's unrealistic and frankly stupid to expect this group to have one consistent message. They're not anarchists, they're not Nazis (fuck the heck, Ann Coulter?!?), they're not lazy and uneducated, and they're not hippies--although some of them are probably all of these things. The only thing these people have in common is that they're unemployed (or underemployed), pissed off, and tired of not having their voice heard. And that much I can certainly get behind (well, not the unemployed part... whatever, you get my point).

So let's leave it to Jon Stewart to explain the rest, because he does a pretty terrific job of showing just how absurd things can become when we try so hard to categorize the un-categorizable.

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Ignore these people at your own peril. I have a feeling this group won't be quite as easy to co-opt into a political party as was the Tea Party.