While strolling to class through the swirling fall melancholia, it’s easy to look past the flashy signs and fleeting messages taped hastefully to streetlights and just avoid the hemorrhaging provided by these typically obnoxious attention-seekers. But something caught me off guard the other day. A bright yellow sign with tense, bold lettering, “Occupy Milwaukee.”

I had heard of Occupy Wall Street, but my ignorance to these global economic issues soon came to a halt when I realized the unity, breadth and swift movement of the protests.

Here at Marquette, students and faculty alike have undoubtedly been ailing from the poor state of our economy, and financial aid can only amount to a limited solace. Occupy Milwaukee has sought to achieve similar goals of the initial protests, and the organization even has its own Twitter page to help allocate efforts and communicate protesting events.

But at a broader level, class discrepancies and wage gaps have effectively dislocated the American working class’s sense of complacency. It’s clear in the media, as they disparaged the plights of various Wall Street protesters, it’s seen in the hot-topic issues of unemployment rates and low interest rates and it’s most readily manifested in the overwhelming sentiment of Americans across the map: we’re livid. And the funny thing is that everyone else not in that category of the disgruntled, irritable 99 percent is running scared or hiding behind corporate government.

Take, for example, the “too big to fail” corporations and the enormous banks. They have been hiring numerous police officers to guard their respective business practices, and thousands of steel barricades have been arranged to curtail the influx of protesters, according to the New York Times.

The amount of deep-seeded corruption and unchecked greed remaining in Wall Street is unparalleled, from sub-prime derivatives to absurd bonuses; the protesting has exacted little hindrance of these practices. Unless powerful political reform and staunch regulations are made, what looms ahead is a frightful future for our economic and social potentials.