A Quick Thought About Occupy Wall Street by Marc Usery

As 2011 drew to a close and the media began listing their top stories of the year, many listed Occupy Wall Street at the top or near the top.  That made me draw a similarity to OWS and a scene in the film Hot Rod.  Never seen it?  Here is the scene I am talking about:

Like the scene above, I think OWS started out with good intentions.  They were there to mostly protest the special treatment Wall St. got with the bail-outs and such.  As a conservative with libertarian leanings, I couldn't agree more!  After all, the Tea Party was started by protesting the exact same thing.  Maybe OWS didn't have a strong central message and consisted of mainly college-aged kids, but hey, if they were waking up to the problems that we, as a nation, face, good for them!  Sadly, as we heard more from them, we realized that it was less about "the government shouldn't be in the bail-out business," and more about "the government should bail us out too!"

But, the biggest problem with not having a strong message is that anyone can make the movement into whatever they want and it can quickly devolve into nothing more than a mob.  Just like in the video, all is going well and has a positive feeling, then an idiot decides to throw a trash can through a window and all hell breaks loose.  People start looting stores, starting fires, flipping cars, fighting cops in full riot gear, making out, etc...  The very same happened with OWS.  It was going fine, nothing new about protests in the USA.  You may not have agreed with the message but had no problem with them being there.  Then the idiots arrived...  defecating on police cars, running around naked, raping people, stealing from and assaulting one another, vandalizing buildings and memorials, using and dealing drugs, and baiting cops into arresting them, or heaven forbid, using pepper spray!  Not to mention, the sanitation issues and health problems some were facing due to living in pure filth.  Over at Andrew Breitbart's "Big" sites they have been keeping a list of all the OWS incidents.  Last I looked it was at 417.  (Have a look for yourself: http://biggovernment.com/jjmnolte/2011/10/28/occupywallstreet-the-rap-sheet-so-far/)  

What should have happened with OWS is what happened at the end of the clip.  The original organizers, media, and politicians who came out early in support should have separated themselves from the movement and said "wait, a second... What the heck just happened?!  How do we get this thing back on track?"  Instead, all we heard were excuses ("you can't judge the entire movement on one crazy guy!") and comparison's to the Tea Party.  The very same Tea Party that the media were trying to convince us were gearing up for an armed take over of the government.  By the way, didn't they base their entire view of the Tea Party off the one crazy guy?  It's a little funny how when a large group of fiscally conservative individuals gather to protest big government, they are labeled as racist, dangerous, and ignorant without a single shred of evidence.  But, when a liberal leaning mob descends on many of the nation's cities, the very same media talk of how peaceful, open-minded, and intelligent they are despite the evidence piled up against them.