Who Is Really Escalating The Occupy Movement Towards Violence?

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is
only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." - Gandhi

So far this morning I’ve read tweets that call for civil war against the establishment, expanding the Occupy protest into the suburbs in some cities and calling for a general strike across the world. I’ve seen tweets and posts demanding the resignation of Oakland’s mayor, calls for more rallies and accusations that the Mayor of New York and the police have escalated the situation.

I don’t actually recall any statement, official or otherwise, from either the police or the mayor calling for more action and confrontation but as can be seen in the representative examples above, there is a lot of it coming out of the Occupy Movement.

Where there was once a peaceful protest established to draw attention to the unregulated and greedy practices of the securities industry, there is now a confused call to action. What action remains to be seen but clearly this protest has allowed itself to go into free-fall and is either drunk on the little bit of power it thinks it has or has been taken over by political activists with an agenda that goes far beyond the demonstrators’ original intent.

People on all sides are starting to get hurt. As I wrote in an earlier post, a woman in the Occupy movement was raped. Scott Olsen, an American vet, was seriously injured in the confrontation between police and protesters in Oakland while he was trying to help someone else who had been injured. And there are countless others who’s names and injuries we don’t know.

Hundreds have been arrested, primarily because they were deluded into thinking that the protest was for something worthwhile but is it?

What is Occupy’s real purpose? It clearly isn’t what was originally stated. People living in the suburbs are part of the 99%, why would Occupy start an occupation protest there? Originally, Occupy was about non-confrontational demonstration, why the change? What is the objective of all this increased confrontational rhetoric?

I don’t think anyone, including the Occupy protest itself, can answer that because I think it has been overtaken by events. Not having a real and defined purpose, it is constantly escalating events in an attempt to find one. Officials react and respond which leads to confrontation which only leads to more escalation.

Innocent people have been hurt and if this continues in the direction in which it is headed, there is a very real possibility of someone being killed on either or both sides of this protest. The only question everyone on all sides of this issue should be asking themselves right now is this. “Is this what we really want?”

If it is, the only other question each person needs to ask themselves is, “Do I want to be a martyr for the cause?”


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