Currently there is a diffuse protest running on Wall Street in New York City with people camping on the streets and signs bearing a variety of messages. Reuters reports 5,000 people at one day's rally, spouting generic lines such as "I want a better world for my children."
One gets the feeling the protesters may intend to stay until someone can tell them what they are complaining about. That might be quite a long time.
My best guess is that the underlying cause of complaint is that the people who are protesting had assumed that they were among the "us" of "us and them". They may have felt that they were part of the family at the corporations where they were employed -- until they were laid off. They may have believed that they could depend on the wealth which was based on highly inflated real estate prices -- until the bubble burst. Or they might have assumed that health insurance was assured -- until they lost coverage.
They had joined the ranks of "them". Didn't like it. Still want to be "us".
I'm not confident from the news coverage that the protesters have developed any sympathy for the people who already were "them", the people who didn't have highly paid jobs to be laid off from, who didn't own expensive houses with even larger mortgages, and didn't have health insurance to lose. The quotations from the protesters sound like people who thought they were among "us" and want to return to being "us". They sound like people who want to play by rules which they thought were were governing the game previously.
I don't think you can go back to those rules because I don't think those rules were ever in play. When I was employed by a gigantic corporation, I never believed that I was part of the "us" who ran the place. The corporate leaders often said that we were all part of the family but there was precious little support for anyone doing the work. For years I cringed each time I heard about a family who had decided to move into a house that was beyond their means, and there were plenty of such stories to be heard. When the recession crashed down, I mentally sighed and said, "Surely you saw it coming. Those are the rules for this game."
The real rules say that if you accept risk you may be rewarded -- or you might lose everything. In the novel The Triumph of Caesar Steven Saylor wrote, "There is nothing so unsure as the plans we make that rely on the sensible behavior of another human being." In this case, the plans depended on the sensible behavior not of one other but of thousands of other human beings, each of whom was partially blinded by personal self-interest.
The difference from the rules these protesters seem to wish for and the real rules runs deeper than that, however. The real rules say that financial security, comfortable housing, and payment arrangements for health care and other needs are all transient benefits, not the goals of life. They are useful tactics but ultimately to be cast aside. The real rules say that everything which defines the "us" of "us and them" is so much haze, to disappear when morning comes.
One observer in New York opined that the protesters "have reminded everybody about the realities of this country." I think that overstates the case. I think the protesters are asking for a return to illusion, not for facing reality. They want their own lives to matter, but in misty terms. They want to be able to believe again that they are "us".
In actual reality, the ones who will finally matter are "them".