"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Unfortunately, democracy means there will be stuff said that offends us. I read stuff every day that offends the hell out of me but while I will sometimes challenge it, I never feel so threatened by it that I have to try and overpower it in order to reassure myself.Yesterday I wrote about the lack of ideas coming out of the Occupy protest and that ruffled a few feathers. I see lots of messaging about saving this camp or that. I read repeatedly messages criticizing corporations and banks and just about anyone else Occupy has on their constantly evolving enemies list. When you have the gall to ask what they propose to do about it, bingo; the response is defensive and usually an attack on the question rather than a concrete or thoughtful answer.
I got asked three times yesterday alone what ideas I had as a defense against my question about what ideas Occupy had. The questions were thrown at me sarcastically in an attempt to undermine my criticism and not as sincere invitations to exchange ideas. It is very revealing about a movement that is more about complaint than it is about solutions.
It is also revealing that when I offered up a series of ideas for consideration and discussion, there was no reply but then, that too is typical of Occupy. When the rubber actually hits the road, Occupy is long gone.
Occupy is not alone in there approach. There is a high level of intolerance in what used to be debate. Everything is personal and instead of a free exchange of ideas, there is little more than personal attacks. To be fair, I had a long discussion with three Occupy supporters on Sunday night that was quite different. We didn’t agree on most issues but we were able to have the discussion with respect for each other, if not for each others ideas.
That doesn’t happen very often with Occupy supporters who have turned what should have been a protest that brought people together into rancorous division. They did that by being too self-absorbed, too self-righteous and too unwilling to admit and correct the mistakes being made within their own movement.
You have no credibility in your criticism of others if you aren’t prepared to recognize your own mistakes and do something to try and fix them.
Occupy has invited the criticism it receives by its actions and its self-righteous attacks on others. It talks a good game but it doesn’t dress to play. It talks about representing the 99% but then disrupts the lives and vandalizes the communities of those it claims to represent. It has turned defending its tent camps into a bigger issue than the issues it purports to be protesting and wanting to address.
It demands the right to free speech but shouts down or attempts to demean the opinions of others with whom it doesn’t agree and it attacks corporations and banks for their alleged crimes while turning a blind eye to the crimes associated with its own community.
Everything except ideas is exaggerated in Occupy.
The latest meeting was huge. The number of people supporting this event or that march is massive when it really isn't. The police evicting them from a camp is an attack using chemical weapons and military-like brutality. Camp evictions have become synonymous with the streets of Egypt where protesters are actually dying to gain what Occupy takes for granted and abuses here.
No hyperbole is too big to escape use and there is no moderation or honest evaluation.
It’s a power trip for those who felt powerless, not a protest movement. It is an orgy of self-empowerment that has turned tents into something more meaningful than the issues we all face. But in the end, it is much ado about nothing.
Instead of ideas to discuss, Occupy offers drum circles and endless general assemblies to discuss the same stuff over and over. Instead of proposed solutions, it keeps firing off a litany of criticism that the rest of us are too familiar with. Instead of being a positive,influence for change, Occupy generates negativity and anger with its constant disruption and attacks on the people it depends on for support.
It has become a movement that considers itself under siege even as it besieges public and private property. It sees itself as the movement that will change the world for the better without putting forward one, solitary idea on how that will be accomplished...and they get damned irritated when you point that out.
In the end, it is a movement that started in New York and spawned pale imitators across North America and in Europe. In India, it never caught on because in India, the poor see capitalism not Occupy as their best opportunity for a better life. In Canada, the movement really never had a chance. It was a protest looking for an excuse to exist and one by one, the tent cities are closing, not with a bang but a whimper. By the time they closed the Vancouver camp, it was down to 7 pitiful tents.
In the States, the movement is still holding on but it has less support than the Tea Party and it is only a matter of time for most of those camps too. In England, the protest is struggling but has tried to find a different approach than that in North America.
In the end, Occupy hasn’t got much to show for all the noise except for an outrageous expense to cities as a result of the vandalism and crime. It can’t even take credit for putting the issues on the table. It was because the issues were already on the table that Occupy was born. It was the child of discontent, not the parent and in the end; most of what it has done was simply childlike.
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