Occupy Wall Street Gets Occupied

A protest without a message is a protest that will induce protest within itself, scuttling any message and in the end mandating a swift responsible response to curtail any ongoing menace to the protesters themselves and others.

Such is the case with the Occupy Wall Street "movement", which has become "Occupy Everywhere", and now occupied in turn by freeloaders, freaks, and fanatics looking for a handout or an excuse to be a victim and victimize others. Permitting elements not just hostile to the established order but to order itself, these semi-planned protests have become a justifiable object of protest, by the majority of Americans seeking redress through the political process instead of "anti-political" sit ins, and even the protesters themselves, growing more wary for their own safety.

Occupy Everywhere camps, at first opening their borders (or the fringes of the make-shits tenting meetings) to the poor, now must institute the very law and order which they vocally disdain, having burdened peace officers and frustrated markets and commerce throughout the country. Volunteer security participants have stepped up to protect themselves -- as if they can or will protect others! -- while volunteer medical staff attempt to provide health and wellness services to those who seem content to take the same from law-abiding citizens who refuse to clutter the public square and break the law in the name of "protest".

At the bests of the initial wave of demonstrators, the homeless have also begun occupying Occupy Everywhere. Now, these community organizers of spontaneous disorder are blessed (or cursed) with weeding out the wheat from the chaff, those who are there to protest versus those there to free-load or cause trouble.

"The city ] wasn't giving us what we needed," said one shiftless drifter now nestling in Occupy Everywhere at Portland, Oregon. This entitlement mentality, which has bred the discontent of the fraction claiming to be the 99%, is now infiltrating and frustrating the very movement bent on doing the same to the whole country. Nevertheless, Occupy Everywhere wants to exploit the homeless as sympathy-props for their rage-at-anything agenda. To their growing chagrin, the homeless are now exploiting them.

As a consequence ( a reality of political life which many of these "99%" Protests seem intent on ignoring), Occupy Everywhere must now tend with all the civic problems that come with the cities which they have occupied.

To characterize the stark dysfunction of these makeshift protest-villages, one need only ponder the immoral danger of children playing in rowdy, noisy squalor in which sex-offenders have registered themselves to live in and the mentally ill continue to be a threat to themselves and others.

Law and order, of low import for the Occupy Everywhere crowd, has become a premium concern within their makeshift camps.

In one of the crudest of ironies, there is now an A (for "anarchy") camp within Occupy Portland, complete with borders and divisions of status for the long-term impoverished and the political rebels whose political philosophy is a crass mixture of "I do as I please" "You must do what I want".

"We're here to spoil each other," a volunteer medic commented in one of the camps. "It's a big messy, beautiful thing." To those getting the handouts, indeed it is a beautiful thing, short-lived as it certainly will be. Yet Occupy Everywhere wants to convert charity into a government mandate at Everyone Else's expense, a messy affair that makes government big and bigger to the detriment of individual liberty (read the now-defunct political atrocities of Soviet and Moaist Communism), a consequence by no means beautiful for anyone.

In their earnest (and reprehensible) desire to protest without coherent reason, Occupy Everywhere has made a mockery of the First Amendment and disregarded the rest of the American people's lawful exercise of their own rights. The key word in the First Amendment relating to assembly and petition is "peaceably." Occupy Everything has become anything but. Now the squatting protesters are contending not only with creating undo unrest for the country, attacking symbolic power structures which have nothing to do with the economic and political downturns in this country; they are also creating deviant, dysfunctional, and dangerous communities for themselves and their peers, and their children. Their refusal to articulate an articulate plan of protest and policy has undermined their loose associations, exposing an agenda of no worth and greater opprobrium.