This past week, London caught on fire. Sort of. There was a little bit of smoke, at least. As the Group of 20 developed and emerging countries, the G20, met to coordinate a response to what is now being acknowledged as an economic crisis of global proportions, they were met by some protest. The BBC reported that about 5,000 people joined protests over the course of the two-day summit, with some minor violence and a noteworthy ransacking of the London office of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The days were eventful but not tumultuous. The summit came to no really groundbreaking conclusions. It pumps more than a trillion dollars back to the International Monetary Fund, which was scheduled to be recapitalized anyway, so that it can keep doing what is has been doing for decades. World leaders agreed on the need to agree, and while meta-cooperation is great for a photo-op, it won't get us very far.
The protests, too, were in many respects disappointing. The substance was there, but the volume just wasn't. At just 5,000 members strong, one seems guaranteed to find more anger (both in gross terms and per capita) at any given Final Four game. The BBC spotted a young man named David Jones holding a sign that may just be the most self-aware assessment of the whole weekend. "Down with this sort of thing!" it read.
In my last column I called for an official commission report on the determinants of this crisis. The rationale was that we have no public consensus on the causes and scale of the collapse, which prevents both effective recovery policy and effective protest. Bonuses to bailed-out executives such as those at AIG channeled a huge amount of populist rage, but at what? At a couple of millions of dollars in the scheme of a multi-trillion dollar crisis? If people knew what exactly to be upset about and how upset they should be, it is possible that the reaction might have been a bit different.
I had the pleasure of visiting my high school this past Friday to give a guest lecture (cute, right?) on the ways in which I have been occupying my time since I graduated. Because the specifics of my work would bore the living daylights out of high school students, I spoke more generally about economic development. When students and teachers began asking me about the G20 meeting going on in London, things began to get hairy.
Clearly a precocious group, these students asked exactly the same questions that the adult community would like to have answered, but in earnest. They want answers to the same questions that are being asked by the protesters which have London slightly ruffled, but a bit more innocently. These are questions that I just couldn't answer.
What are they doing in London? Why is it so important to give a trillion dollars to the IMF? What is the IMF going to do with that money that is different from what they have been doing? Granted, this is not a traditional high school, but if these 16-year-olds are able to identify these gaping holes in public information, it really makes me wonder why this information hasn't yet been produced.
Perhaps the truth would be a little too much. There is much talk of radicalism these days, but until the general masses become educated enough to become radicalized (or at least, the situation becomes dire enough for us to connect the dots for ourselves), I doubt that much will ever happen.
I have a political science professor, a man who has worked for years in government and watched from the inside as the Soviet Union collapsed. He has gone so far as to say that there is an off chance-one in a hundred, he says-that Gen. David Petraeus will bring his troops to D.C. and hold a constitutional convention. The editorial pages of major newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have been running articles hinting at the possibility of major upheaval. Thoughts of protest, of revolt and of sea change are entering the public consciousness. But until we have a more concrete idea of the scope and details of the crisis, it seems to me that public outrage will be insufficient to carry these revolutionary impulses to fruition.
Andrew Kindman is a Trinity junior. This is his last column of the year.
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