I don't think the OWS are any more practical than the TPM. In fact, quite the opposite. I think the OWS is kind of the result of an entitlement society. The OWS complain about how they can't get a job after college. But that's because they won't take a job that is beneath them, even in this economy.
When I graduated college in 1985, I went active duty military. When I finally got out in 1992, the economy was in the shitter, so I took a job working in a warehouse. Eventually, I showed that I had a lot more capability than that, and moved up quickly to supervisory and purchasing work. In short, I proved myself through hard work. And I've had setbacks in the intervening 20 years. I'm still not where I'd like to be.
The problem I see with OWS is that they want the government to establish results without them doing the work. I think it's where that generation has gone soft. Adversity is not making them better, it's making them worse.
Well, naturally I don't see it that way, and I would like to point out something about the generational dynamic. If you graduated from college in 1985, that probably means you were born sometime in the 1960s, which makes you probably an early-wave Gen-Xer. If you graduated late, you could be a very late-cohort Boomer, but Xer is more likely. (Note that the demographic "baby boom" and the Boomer generation don't overlap perfectly; 1943-45 are considered Boom birth years and 1961-64 aren't.)
Most people involved in Occupy, as you observe, are the next generation after yours, the Millennials. Generation X is what we call a "reactive" generation, very individualistic. Their mission in life, coming of age right after a period of cultural upheaval and re-set of collective values, was to test those values in real life and refine them, all of which is better done small-scale than large-scale.
Now the thing about the Millennials is that they're a "Civic" generation. They're collective mission in life is to fix what's wrong with our civic order, with our economy and politics. And so it's not good enough for any one of them to beat the odds as you did and make it. They're here to fix the broken system so that it isn't so damned hard to make it. It really shouldn't be, you know. That may give go-getters a maximum of personal satisfaction in having achieved something despite the stacked deck, but it's still not the right way to organize our society.
As long as the rules are set up the way they are now, it's always going to be the case that most people can't make it. It's competitive: a person who does make it, makes it not because he tried hard enough to meet some objective test, but because he tried harder (or had more talents, etc. going for him) than the competition did. The smartest and best of the Millies, like the smartest and best of any generation, know that they, personally, can make it. But that's not good enough. They know that things can be set up so that most people make it, because it's been done before, and we're richer now than we were then, and so that's what they want to see happen. You'll never understand where they (or Occupy) are coming from if you look at it from a
me standpoint, or assume that's what they're doing, because they're not. You have to understand it from a
we perspective.