R i g h t a r d i a: Class War in America blog: Tea Partiers Are Wrong About “Occupy”

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Class War in America blog: Tea Partiers Are Wrong About “Occupy”

The Tea Partiers (TP-ers) ought to look twice at Occupy, and think twice about whether both movements share nothing. They do. It’s just that TP-ers have the wrong target for their anger. They don’t understand the source of the problem, which is contained in the name “Occupy Wall Street”.

Part of their misperception comes from the fact that Occupy has moved into a new stage. All these protests, over 600 of them, have become semi-permanent encampments. This brings a whole new look to the movement, and certain undesirable things. The encampments are starting to look like Hoovervilles, tent cities, with certain important differences.

To begin with, in every city there are a few marginal people who pop out of the woodwork and show up wherever the “action” is. Some have a tenuous grip on reality. Semi-permanent encampments are just the thing for them, and there they are, dressed bizarrely, sometimes pretty grubby, ready to take advantage of anything that’s free, ready to make trouble for the cops, and all the rest. But it’s a free country, and unless they break laws, even the weirdest among us must be tolerated.

The concentrated presence of such people is most unfortunate, because the Occupy movement is much, much larger than them. We don’t look like the Tea Party’s cherry-picked photos of undesirables nobody is really fond of. We look more like the Tea Party folks than the encampment folks, and TP-ers can see this if they look at pictures of larger gatherings, where the rest of us show up. Most of us aren’t there at the encampments.

Something similar to the encampments happened during the Depression. Tent cities called “Hoovervilles”, consisting of people made desperate by the unlimited greed of the very rich, sprang up. And of course they quickly became messy and dirty, with no way to be otherwise.

But were they to be blamed? Some thought so, and launched violent raids against the Hoovervilles and their occupants. Sometimes these raids were by police, sometimes by hooligans. But the victims were victims, first the victims of the rich, then the victims of violent people who blamed them for their victimhood.

TP-ers have a simplistic and nonfunctional answer to the problems of the day: oppose all things Obama, detest all Democrats, blame all victims of the current situation. They think the entire problem the country faces lies with a few ne’er-do-well types who just want to collect unemployment, whereas it seems very obvious that the problem lies at the other end of the socio-economic scale.

That’s why it’s called Occupy Wall Street, Wall Street being the symbol of the gross greed and dishonesty that have caused so much economic dysfunction and misery. At least one third of Americans agree; TP-ers don’t have that kind of agreement.

TP-ers are right to be angry. They just have the wrong target. For that they should be understood, not condemned. If only they could be induced to let go of their irrational hatreds. If only they could be induced to understand that the Occupy movement represents us all. Or at least the 99% of us who don’t own everything.

source: http://classwarinamerica.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/tea-partiers-are-wrong-about-%E2%80%9Coccupy%E2%80%9D/