Reasons Why

Buzzfeed, which is a page of essentially random but interesting newsfeeds I read daily via my feed reader of choice, Feedly, recently had a post up titled “25 Reasons Why Police Officers Never Show Up to Tea Party Rallies.” The 25 “reasons” were, in fact, 25 photos of Tea Party protesters carrying firearms during protests. No doubt, the point they were trying to make was that the police were too afraid to arrest these (armed) protesters but are more than willing and happy to play the big, brave cops when faced with the peaceful, peace-loving, hugs-and-granola-types in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Not quite.

First, there seems to be this huge amount of outrage that Tea Party protesters would bring guns to a protest rally. zOMG. They’ve got guns. The world is gonna end! Revolution is upon us. Fact is, however, that the places where Tea Party protesters have brought firearms to rallies are all places where carrying firearms is perfectly legal.

New Mexico, for example, which is cited in the first article snippet on the Buzzfeed page, allows open carry without a permit of any kind. 25 other states do as well. Overall, 42 states allow open carry (with or without a permit). And as much as the media would like to make believe that only a nut would carry firearms to a political rally, the fact remains (and even the media has to admit) that this happens to be perfectly legal in most places.

The fact that police doesn’t generally show up to Tea Party protests is also a falsehood … police show up plenty to political rallies, whether they’re conservative or liberal in nature. The fact is, however, that they rarely feel the need to arrest people at conservative rallies, such as those held by the Tea Party, because those protesters don’t behave in a way that bears being arrested – they don’t usually present any sort of risk to others, don’t block roadways, don’t squat on private property, and don’t leave trash. When told to disperse, they disperse, rather than shouting and acting like a threatening mob.

You also don’t hear about cases of protesters being raped, assaulted, or robbed at Tea Party rallies. At Occupy Wall Street in Baltimore, on the other hand, they’re circulating pamphlets that discourage women who were raped in the protest camp from reporting their rape. In Seattle, a protester was arrested after exposing himself to children. And, of course, residents of New York aren’t happy having the protesters in their back yards where they add noise, block roads, harass people who are on their way to work, and present a general health and sanitation hazard. I don’t think I’ve seen any such complaints about the Tea Party movement.

If Occupy Wall Street has a sensible point to make, they are missing their chance to do so by allowing the sort of conduct that is being allowed in their protests – squatting on private property, defecating on police cars, rape, robbery, assault, harassing average people going to work, blocking roads and sidewalks, and so on, and so forth.

There are plenty of ways to protest – in public and with signs – that will get the message across and will do so without turning whole neighborhoods against them due to their conduct. There is a reason so many people are thinking of the Occupy movement as a bunch of lazy, lay-about, dirty hippies … for the same reasons people assume hippies are dirty and lazy. Because there are those who give that impression and, as the saying goes, the squeaky (or should that be, the smelly?) wheel gets the grease. The yucky get noticed, basically.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think the Occupy movement as a whole has any clue regarding what they are actually protesting for or against. I understand why it started and what the original reasoning behind it was, but then it started to look more and more like every single protester had their own idea as to why they were there and what needed to be changed. And then they completely lost me with the list of demands that seems to be changing by the minute. Some demands are reasonable. Some are ridiculous … like free college education and open borders migration. My personal ridiculous favorite is the call for “a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment.”

Nuts!

But, what really bothers me the most is this “the 99%” claim. How dare these people to presume that they are speaking for me? Or that their interests, whatever they are, somehow represent mine. And I’m certainly not in or anywhere near the 1%.

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