Middle Aged, Middle Class and Just as Mad

I've been thinking a lot about the Occupy Wall Street protests lately. I believe they represent the frustrations of a clear majority of Americans. However, their youth, appearance and some of their antics are undoubtedly off putting to a lot of people. In addition, these kinds of protests tend to get diluted when different people start to come in with all their different concerns. People on the left tend to place a high value on diversity and right of everyone to have a voice. However, this leads to a dilution in message, momentum and focus.

This all leads me to 2 ideas. The first is that unthreatening looking people like me should participate in the protest. We should be clad in the business casual clothes or soccer mom outfits that we wear in our blandly middle class lives. We could carry signs that say things like "Middle Aged, Middle Class and Just as Mad". And we could rally around a single demand. Steve Pearlstein had a great column in this morning's Washington Post mentioning the "financial-transaction tax". This old idea would reduce the volume of the dangerous speculative trading which is really just a form of gambling that has done so much damage to the economy and many of our hopes for the future. It would also pay for a lot of that damage as well.