The Occupy Wall Street movement has been in full swing for the past few months. The gist is that people have finally discovered that the vast bulk of wealth in the world is in the hands of only a few people. With money comes power, and they use this power to influence the government and generally avoid having to deal with the consequences of misbehavior. So the have-nots have finally had enough, and have decided to congregate near the primary source of the greed and corruption: Wall Street in New York City.
This was the start of an admirable protest. The problem is that it’s months later now, and it’s still just a start. There’s still no coherent message or goal.
If you ask a serious, knowledgeable protester what they hope to achieve, you’ll hear things like “ending corporate influence on elections,” or “anti-gerrymandering laws,” or even “full-blown election reform.” There’s a long list of legitimate gripes against the government, especially over the lack of influence or representation the average citizen gets from their representatives.
Ask the remaining 90 percent of the Occupy crowd, and you get vapidity like “We all need to just love each other, man,” or “Corporations are bad, man,” and, more often, “It can’t be illegal if it’s made by mother nature, man.” It’s true that large movements need people like this to swell the numbers, but somebody forgot to tell them to never speak.
The ideas behind Occupy Wall Street require way too much detail than can fit in a 30 second sound bite, but some stoned neo-hippie blathering about peace and pot makes for a good giggle on the evening news.
There should be a few people tapped with the responsibility of speaking to the media, and everybody should know who and where they are to keep the message on track.
None of this will do any good, though, since the protesters can’t really do anything except be annoying. Money trumps annoying, and the so-called “1%” has just as much money and influence as they did when the protests began.
The anti-Vietnam movement didn’t have much government support, but they did have affiliated groups that made up the difference. The Black Panthers scared the distilled diarrhea right out of the establishment, and there were even some fringe groups that engaged in some misplaced violence which lent seriousness to the movement.
Occupy Wall Street’s fringe groups are the jackasses with drums and the bigger jackasses in Guy Fawkes masks. The drummers serve no purpose other than to compete for attention and try to compensate for a lack of understanding about what’s happening.
The morons in the Guy Fawkes masks are worse. They want to protest because they saw how cool the Anonymous vs. Scientology protests were, and the Anonymous protesters wore Fawkes masks.
Anonymous wore those masks because Scientologists like to financially ruin people who oppose them, and so were attempting to hide their identities. For Occupy Wall Street, they targets don’t need to know who you are to financially ruin you, so stop it. If you need a mask, you might want to try Sloth from “The Goonies,” because you come off as about that intelligent.
President Obama has already demonstrated that protesters are fine and to be treated seriously and with respect, as long as they happen in unfriendly countries run by leaders we do not like. Over here, he pretty much left it up to the individual states and cities to decide what to do with protesters. And they’ve decided to wait until the judges go to bed, and then suspend freedom of the press and along with the rest of the Bill of Rights while they’re at it.
Occupy is determined to remain “peaceful” at all costs, which is just sad and pathetic.
Change has never happened with politeness and obedience. Being annoying just means you don’t get invited to any parties. You have to be willing to make noise, display passion and break some rules.
But nobody has the passion to do these things. No, instead of a loud, raucous, passionate crowd, Occupy Wall Street brought apologies and twinkle-fingers.
I’m not advocating violence and vandalism, but there needs to be some level of resistance. Unless Occupy Wall Street decides to get serious, the movement is nothing more than an extended camping trip in the city. And without a willingness to push back, the protest can end up being broken up by a single reservist police officer with a package of water balloons.
