Day: November 19, 2011

Back on Oct 22 I wrote a short piece about the incoherent message of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

In that piece I said something to the effect,  that unless the message was clear and to the point that “Average” americans would loose interest.

Looks like that is exactly what’s happening.

I was chatting with someone yesterday who seemed to thing that the violence that has occurred over the past week toward the OWS crowds in many cities will increase the movement instead of disperse it. His thinking is that “average”americans will take offense at the OWS camps being systematically dismantled by police, and that they will join the OWS crowd in solidarity.

I understand his point but I don’t think he’s correct.

The problem remains the same. The OWS “Movement” still has a very incoherent message.

They haven’t created a simple message that America can actually get behind. This is in part because of the spin created by the media, but mostly it’s because OWS hasn’t done any kind of work at controlling the message that the media is presenting on their behalf.

Scenes of police tear-gassing crowds doesn’t have the same impact on us as a people as it did in the 60s. We’ve seen too much. We’ve had 10 years of war up close and personal. We’ve had scandal and trials about everything from abuses of political power to the treatment of our enemies in prison and what constitutes abuse. (For the record… making a prisoner wear panties on his head isn’t abuse… humiliation maybe, but not abuse.)

We as a people have become numb to riots and violence in general. It doesn’t matter where they happen they always look the same, they always end the same and just aren’t shocking anymore.

Apparently, the Occupy crowd is thinking that police brutality will galvanize public opinion.

They may be right…

The $64,000 question will be which way? Will public opinion swing in sympathy toward the Occupy crowd regardless of their complete lack of platform? Or will public opinion swing towards an attitude of “ABOUT TIME, get those squatters out of the public spaces and make ’em stop hindering folks going about their business”

I think that the fickle beast of public opinion is about to move toward the “Get out of here ya BUMS!” side of Occupy.

Occupy Wall Streets 15 minutes of fame is over.

In my opinion they’ve done nothing but HURT the protest process. For the remainder of this election season, anyone protesting, regardless of their message will be seen as a bunch of directionless irrelevant idiots from Occupy.

Occupy Wall Streets legacy will be that they killed the public protest and by abusing their free speech they silenced us all.

Nice Job!