According to OccupyWallSt.org, the Occupy Wall Street Movement was a “fight back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process.” In other words, the citizens no longer trusted the big banks and how they operated, so they protested against the banks to let them know that they now oppose them. Prior to this movement, big banks and multinational corporations were ruling the country’s economic system for more than two decades. Why then do the citizens no longer want to be under its rule? This falls under the topic of Enlightenment, which was a movement that emphasized on reason, as opposed to tradition.

The 2008 recession was what sparked this Enlightenment movement; it opened the eyes of the citizens and made them question why those big banks were in power in the first place. Likewise, in the reading, once exposed to the idea of Enlightenment, “England had ended in the king’s execution in 1649; the French would guillotine their ruler before the end of the eighteenth century.” In Europe, citizens felt the need to get rid of their monarch simply because they no longer trusted them and no longer saw a reason why they should stay under their rule. The Enlightenment period brought about Individualism, the idea that you should be your own ruler, which triggered many European nations to change tradition to abide by this new idea.

Much like the case in Europe, the Occupy Wall Street movement was a movement against authority. That is one aspect of our contemporary life that Enlightenment came to life.

 

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I wanted to submit another response but not as long as the previous one:

 

Talking about political life in America doesn’t just mean one thing. With there being many different beliefs and many cultures behind those beliefs, there are also many different ways that people do things and many different reasons why they do it. Just in our government for example, why are there 3 different branches that are in charge of separate things? It wasn’t a tradition before, there’s reasoning behind it. Long before the creation of America, all nations followed the tradition of a Monarch, which is under the rule of one person. America feared the idea of monarchy, although it was the tradition, they were skeptical about it and did not trust one person to be in control of many. Thus, establishing the three different branches, so that they can check and balance each other out. The reason is so that too much power won’t be put into one branch, let alone one person. That concept alone is a form of Enlightenment, and to this day, we still live under this “separation of power.”