For more than three weeks, thousands of protestors have gathered along Wall Street, in nearby Zuccoti Park and in dozens of cities across the world. And yet most people, even students on this campus, are unfamiliar with its motives. What is it?

It is not, as many claim, a belated-reaction to the Tea Party movement from the left. Nor is it, as Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz wrote, “a few hundred over-educated and underemployed” protesters. This is a movement slowly gaining ground, garnering support from students, organized labor, the unemployed, professional activists and workers from Wall Street itself. In fact, each day the number of protestors swells during lunchtime, as hundreds of stock brokers, traders and sympathizers quietly slip in and out to show their solidarity. It is leaderless, grassroots and directly inspired by the protests in Tahrir Square.

The meaning of Occupy Wall Street is a restoration of reason, a return to American values long since forgotten: equality and opportunity for all members of society. After all, consider the sheer logical disconnect: Prompted by deregulation, Wall Street engaged in excessive speculation and unchecked greed that led to the Financial Crisis of 2008. As a result, growing unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure soon followed, which led to a precipitous decline in tax receipts (and therefore rising deficits). And their solution? Drastically cut spending on healthcare, retirement, unemployment benefits and more. This is madness. To socialize their losses, to punish the 99 percent for the mistakes of the top is one thing; but to flatly refuse that the wealthiest pay 3 percent more by returning to the 1998 marginal tax rate is quite another. It reveals smugness, a contempt for shared sacrifice so great that people are moved to protest.

Unlike the mainstream conservative language of “taking their country back”, Occupy Wall Street‘s goals are couched in a language of inclusiveness, advocating policies which benefit Americans universally. They are: end the excessive influence of corporate money in the political process along with the unrivaled success of the wealthiest 1 percent in directing policy. More broadly, these protestors advocate an economy in which all citizens benefit, not just the economic elite.

A chapter of Democracy Matters has been formed here at NIU–an organization comprised of students who recognize what protestors in New York, Chicago and across the world recognize–and everyone in the NIU community who acknowledges this fact is welcome. Now is the time to act.