It’s been a few weeks since I visited the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. It isn’t something you see every day and honestly, the myriad messages coming at you can be a bit overwhelming and confusing. But I think the movement in general is fairly straightforward to grasp.

Zuccatti Park at the corner of Broadway and Liberty(! ) is the home of the live-in city that is the Occupy Wall Street movement. I spent the better part of a chilly but bright October afternoon among the protesters, wandering through the park, careful to avoid stepping on tents or sleeping bags or other gear. Following the sound of the steady drum beat to the southwest corner of the park, I made it to the music end where about 2 dozen protesters, among them a shirtless fellow sporting a Eugene Hutz-like mustache, smiled and gyrated and cut through the air to the chants of “Wall Street’s on Fire!”

Squeezed in by the World Trade Center site to the north and west and both the American and the New York stock exchanges to the south, the OWS site was many things all at once.

First, it was surprisingly orderly and calm. The park was filled with hundreds of people and surrounded, literally, by barricades and police officers spaced about 10 feet or so apart. Plenty of foreign news outfits were filing video reports and interviewing protesters.

Inside the park there were well thought out divisions with a media/press section, a space for food services, medical services, massages and meditation and yoga, as well as a big board listing times for workshops on organizing, participation, etc. Toward the Church St. end of the park was where I encountered the drum circle with people wildly drumming and dancing and having a grand old time.

So you have the theatrical aspect, the music, the energy, the barrage of properly worded and spelled signs, etc.

But most importantly is the reason all of these people have gathered here in the first place; the growing awareness that the power balance in this country has so shifted to an elite and virtually untouchable class and that the vast majority (the so-called 99%) are effectively powerless to bring about any meaningful change.

This is not an easy story to explain succinctly, only because this disenfranchisement has so many tentacles and so many layers to it. The world and its financial structures are so inter-connected that pulling this apart would be a complex mess. But the place to begin certainly is the general area of Wall Street and the small but exceedingly powerful financial cartel at investment houses like Goldman Sachs and their enablers at the Federal Reserve and the SEC that helped them create the gambling house that Wall Street became, to their benefit and all of our collective loss.

Which is why the mountain of non-sense and misanalysis from the pundit classes is so shameful and perhaps, in the end, what a sleeping citizenry ultimately deserves. Like the vapid commentary, delivered sneeringly and smugly, that runs like this: “Oh look, isn’t it cute how they’re all against capitalism but they all have iPods and computers and cell phones.” Ha ha… yeah, that’s so right. It’s like believing child molestation or rape to be vile and someone asking “why are you against sex?” Please. Spare us.

What I see is not a protest against capitalism per se, but the abuses of the system by the few who have the power and influence to tilt the advantage for themselves and their interests over and against the majority’s. The fact is that every person in this country who didn’t earn $500 million last year for fucking up the world economy through a system of state-sanctioned theft should be supporting the protests wherever you are. I know I am.