Dec 4, 2011

Was Angry Birds a Precursor to Occupy Wall Street?

Angry Birds, for those who don’t know, is an exceptionally popular game on mobile devices in the past year. It’s blown up so huge that there is even a movie in the works. But why is it so popular? There is a simple story to follow. A few pigs steal the eggs of some birds. The birds fight back.
Put in its most simple form, this is an amazing allegory for the current state of wall street.


Image via Wikipedia
Although Occupy Wall Street has remained peaceful, the anger and tension towards the wealthy who have stolen our nest eggs and have hidden in their tall ass, intricately built buildings. Now, I’m not suggesting it’s a perfect metaphor, we’re certainly not going to start launching ourselves at the pigs and more often than not, we’re the ones who are green. But it holds up just the same. We’re trying to destroy what they’ve built, a system that rewards the greediest and most piggish of all people so that our children have a better future. And we wouldn’t mind finding a golden egg or two, now would we?
The symbol of the rich has, for too long, been a cat. A big fat cat with claws that’ll slit your throat and a nice suit but now we’re moving towards the notion of the pig. A fat, ugly, smelly pig and Angry Birds is at the heart of this. There is another person who has been traditionally seen as a pig and that is the cop. A single cop, Lt. John Pike, looks more piggish than the rest, if I do say so myself. If Angry Birds had made a pig that shoots pepper spray at the birds I would swoon my heart out.



And we are the birds. Aren’t we? The Occupy movement has been made up of many colors, each with their own strengths and characteristics working together to make ourselves even more powerful than the ones hiding in buildings of stone and wood. And now that we’ve gathered together, we must strike back. We fight with knowledge though. We’ve already learned a great deal about laws that help enable the pigs to steal our wealth and as we continue to discuss and argue within our own ranks we figure out ways to destroy that system.

That system is best represented by the Federal Reserve. A building of corruption. While there is a lot of disagreement, some want to audit and fix the fed while others want to end it entirely, we can all agree that the fed is corrupt.

This concept is so deep in my mind last night, without connecting it to Angry Birds, I thought about a protest idea of releasing white doves, called love bombs, during the next raid. Symbols have power and can capture the imagination better than anything else. I dreamt about this while my friends were under attack in multiple cities across the country. I wanted to contribute and that was where my mind went.