It wasn’t until people saw a police officer macing a defenseless woman locked in a cage that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began to garner attention from the establishment media. When widespread shock at such an egregious act made ignoring OWS impossible, the establishment media tried denigrating it; painting the participants with broad brushstrokes from the pallet of tired, “Woodstock”-era clichés. After union workers and airline pilots began showing up in front of the Cathedrals of Wall Street Criminality, it got harder to disparage OWS through lazy references to bongos and granola.

The loose, leaderless organizational structure, as well as the lack of clearly-defined demands, earned OWS sneers from the establishment media. NPR summarized their early disinterest in OWS by stating “the recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.” Why would NPR, or the entire media establishment, feel otherwise given the their fetishistic reverence for the soundbite format?

Though it doesn’t contribute to the kind of “great disruptions” that would spice things up for NPR, OWS’s continued practice of nonviolence has from the outset been instrumental in attracting the imaginations of participants and sympathizers. Actually, most things that have confused the media and the authorities about OWS have in fact given it strength, and provide hope that the movement will continue to grow. Occupy Wall Street is not a protest, in the words of Matt Zoller, it is “a Church of Dissent.” Rather than be constrained by adhering to a message, the Occupations are growing precisely because they are a space to articulate a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This dissatisfaction is nothing if not justified — and most Americans understand on some level that there are deep-rooted, systemic problems that are negatively affecting almost all of us while a tiny sliver are enriched to an unfathomable degree. Glenn Greenwald dismissed the notion that the aims of OWS were too nebulous:

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power – in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions – is destroying financial security for everyone else?

Certain aspects of our current economic and political crisis have dimensions that seem inscrutable at first glance. As Matt Taibbi summarized, “it’s extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility.” Most Americans don’t understand the truly staggering gulf that constitutes income inequality in this country. It’s hard to explain in a matter of a few word just how brazen and corrupt was the criminality that lead to our current economic crisis. However, if the growing public response to the Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrates anything, it attests that most Americans needn’t be totally versed in the specifics to know our system is broken.

As with any protest, revolt or social movement in our Web 2.0 era, social media is being hailed as a transformative, or even decisive, factor in organizing dissent and enabling resistance. In the case of Occupy Wall Street, this began as an idea from the Canadian activist magazine Adbusters. People were drawn to the erstwhile Zuccotti Park by posters in Adbusters, as well as facebook groups. Occupy Wall Street grew in fits and spurts from mid-September onwards. The various competing Twitter hashtags gradually coalesced into #OWS, which can also be used by activists organizing similar actions throughout the country. On the website OccupyTogether.org, occupations and direct actions are in progress in over 1400 cities worldwide, including 400 American cities.

On a practical level, new media interconnectivity has a lot to offer as a tool for organizing, disseminating information, and building solidarity.On an ideological level, though, this is where online spaces like the blog “We are the 99%” are such vital additions to our public discourse. Television and communications scholar Lynn Spigel explains that the realities of our current media environment are such that it’s harder than ever to disseminate a unifying, hegemonic narrative. Our new media environment ensures that we have the means to enact a dialogue, rather than submit to the bombardment of vacuous corporate propaganda that entrenched powers use to mock, vilify, and distort those messages that would threaten their power.

New media technologies, though, can only enable a movement for justice. There is no substitute for the physical presence of dedicated people demanding justice.For the thousands, who choose to count themselves among the 99%, there is cause for hope for the first time in a long while. Occupy Wall Street is, for all its flaws and rough edges, cause for hope because it is a movement that makes demands of power. The demands themselves may not be comfortably bulleted on Powerpoint, and the cries for economic justice may not yet be formatted for prime time, but something is finally being done to suck out the poison of corporate influence that is coursing through the veins of our body politic.

Last year Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) was speaking about the function of Congress and remarked, “banks…frankly run the place.” As much as Occupied Wall Street is a “Church of Dissent,” an open call to resist, it is also a statement. It’s a statement that those present understand that corrupting influences have wrought great harm to our democratic process and threatened our common financial good. It’s a vote of no-confidence in the Democratic and Republican parties, both of which are equally culpable in sacrificing the promises of our democracy on the altar of corporate contributions.

It’s a cry from America’s young people as we realize that jobs and the very existence of the middle class might be nothing more than a Chimera – a fantasy that we were told while an Oligarchic class plundered our treasury, gambled away our public well-being and turned the democratic process into a macabre charade. In Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, similar thoughts were going through the head of Muhammad Bouazizi the afternoon he succumbed to hopelessness and set himself ablaze, articulating a rage that millions felt throughout the Arab world and beyond. Occupy Wall Street and the Occupations it has inspired across America are acts of great hope–faith that nonviolence and righteousness can save our country from the systemic criminality that has threatened all of our livelihoods. These actions provide the hope that comes from knowing that, at last, there is something that can be done–right now that means going into the streets and Occupying Together.

I have hope, but not in the intangible or in what I can personally accomplish, but in the faith that battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom. –Chris Hedges