COMMENTARY | Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2011 is "the Protestor," made in an announcement on the Today Show according to the Houston Chronicle. This apparently includes Occupy Wall Street as well as those who ushered in the "Arab Spring."
The superficial reasons for choosing the generic protester as person of the year are rather obvious. Governments have been toppled in the Middle East thanks to popular uprisings. That development is going to have far-reaching effects in years to come, most of them bad since those toppled governments are being replaced by radical Islamists enraptured with Sharia law and terrorism against the West.
The accompanying article in Time lumps the Arab Spring revolutionaries with Europeans in Greece and Spain rising up to keep their government benefits and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was a orgiastic reaction against capitalism. Therein lays the flaw of creating something called "the Protester" as person of the year. Protestors have characteristics and motives that are far different, depending partly on what is being protested against.
The Arab Spring protesters were depicted as freedom fighters, seeking to topple old-style authoritarian regimes such as that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. But what seems to be taking their place is hardly something like Arab democracy. The results of the first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt point to the establishment of an Islamist state, complete with Sharia law and hostility to the West.
The Europeans who brawled in the streets of places like Athens and Madrid have far more venal motives. The European welfare state model is collapsing due to the fact that it is no longer sustainable. Europeans are facing the prospect that they will no longer be taken care of from cradle to grave. Instead of adjusting to this new reality, they are having a tantrum.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd was even worse. They pitched encampments in the middle of urban areas that became centers of disease and crime. The latest stunt, trying to close down ports on the West Coast, illustrated the nihilistic nature of the movement.
Barely mentioned is the tea party. The tea party actually effected change at the ballot box last year and hopes to do so again next year. Time is apparently uninterested in that kind of protester. It speaks volumes.
Source: Unusual pick for Time's person of the year, Jeff Blair, The Houston Chronicle, Dec 14, 2011
The Protestor, Kurt Anderson, Time, Dec 14, 2011
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