What started out as a protest against Wall Street just over three months ago blossomed like a bad case of political measles mixed with a combination social hangover, ingrown toenail, food poisoning and visit from your alcoholic uncle who breaks the cool stuff in your house. 
A couple of months ago, I wrote a piecefor Watchdog.org, the investigative journalism site of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, on how Occupy Wall Street and its franchisees had jumped the shark. In early November OWS’ catalogue of criminal acts, social outrages and simple grossness had reached epic proportion. That spew has continued unabated ever since.
That the number of Occupy-related arrests is now 5,817 speaks for itself. How many Tea Party-related arrests were there? How many “O’s” are there in ZERO?
Movements promoting liberty and movements promoting tyranny can have things in common. Both the Tea Party and Occupy shared a sense of outrage and revulsion at the profligacy, waste and corruption that occasioned the Great Recession. But that’s about it – where they diverge is in the endgame. The Tea Party sought to restore to us the joy of our freedom and liberty by reducing government’s grip on our lives and wallets so that the founding principles of the country could again operate as they were intended.
Occupy, however, is a glass-half-empty movement that sees nothing positive in individual liberty, private property and work. Instead, it lusts for more of what got us into the trouble we’re in now: Intrusive government, confiscatory taxes, job-killing regulations, massive increases in entitlements and a general sense that JFK’s maxim about the relationship between a citizen and his country has been turned on its head:“Ask not what you can do for your country, but demand and riot for more of what your country better damn well do for you.”
Unlike their hippie grandparents in the 1960s, Occupy protesters have no romance, despite the best efforts of dopey academics and the mainstream media to give them some. Back in the day, a little doobie and some Crosby, Stills or Dire Straits on the turntable would chill things out no sweat. But now, man these Occupy types are too weird for words – they have no sense of humor or decorum at all.  |
| Occupy’s Platform |
While we’ve seen Occupy violence through and including murder, what we’re likely to see will make that pale by comparison. And it will happen despite continued claims of peaceful intent because, as Chairman Mao said, “In order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”
Occupy groups are edging away from non-violence. Occupy Seattle has created a rift with local left-wing clergy by rejecting an exclusively non-violent strategy in favor of what it calls “a diversity of strategies.” This so-called “diversity” was defined a few weeks earlier by Occupy Oakland radical, Sean O’Brien, when he said that violence shouldn’t be looked at from a moral perspective – is it right or wrong? – but from an effectiveness perspective – does it further the cause?“If it’s to tear down this entire structure and build something better, then it’s only going to take us so far and we are going to come to a point where (non-violence) is not as effective and it is not going to be enough.”
Scott St. Clair is a former investigative journalist with Washington’s Freedom Foundation and a part of the Victoria Taft Blogforce.
