The Three Reasons I Oppose Occupy

"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself."  ~Jane Addams

I’ve often been asked why I concern myself with, and write so many articles about, the Occupy Protest and there are three primary reasons.

The first is the crime Occupy drew to many of its camps and that too many within the movement condoned or to which they turned a blind eye. Occupy likes claim itself to be victimized as a result of more than 4500 protesters being arrested across North America but most of those arrests were for misdemeanors and many of those arrested were simply released later.

Unfortunately, there have been 403 criminal charges laid to date including crimes for rape, crimes against and for endangering children, assault, vandalism and illegal drug use and one arrest for illegal possession of a firearm. These are serious crimes and no organization should be permitted to continue to operate, let alone lecture anyone about the morality of others, when it can’t or won't police its own morality.

The second reason is Occupy’s complete lack of respect for the rights of others. There is an arrogance that I find particularly offensive in any group demanding rights for itself that it refuses to acknowledge or respect for others with whom it disagrees.  I found it reprehensible that a group could be so quick to condemn the sins of others while rationalizing and attempting to hide its own.

The examples are countless and I’ve written about them before so I won’t get into it again here but the simple fact remains that Occupy is highly selective about who they think should enjoy the rights they demand and too often take for granted.

Finally, there is the cost. Too many who have casually supported or who have ignored this protest movement have failed to understand just what this is costing us. It isn’t the 1% who are going to pay for it; as Occupy correctly points out many of the 1% don’t pay taxes and even fewer were inconvenienced. it is taxpayers (read you and I) who are pushed out of our parks, had our streets disrupted, our cities vandalized and who ultimately are picking up the tab for this pointless self-indulgence.

What is the tab? The final numbers aren’t in yet but here’s where we’re at so far.

In Canada which has fewer and much smaller cities than in the United States, the combined cost of the Occupy protest is nearing $2 million with Occupy Vancouver accounting for more than 25% of that cost alone.

In the United States, the cost is much higher.

New York has assessed the cost of OWS to its city at more than $13 million while Occupy Oakland has cost that city in the area of $2.4 million. The following figures are not up to date and in some cases are as much as a month behind final cost assessments but a glance at just eight American cities gives a revealing look at where the final cost is going to end up.

Portland - $775,000; Seattle - $625,999; Atlanta – $651,942; Boston - $575,000; Philadelphia - $500,000; Minneapolis - $226,675; Chicago - $49,000; Los Angeles - $320,000.

There were Occupy encampments in dozens of other smaller cities in both Canada and the United States which will add even more to the final cost but it is clear that Occupy has already cost the 99% in excess of $20 million. Based on projections for all cities when the past month is added on, it is not difficult to estimate the final bill to come in somewhere close to $50 million for all of North America.

What do we have to show for that investment? The answer is pretty much nothing. Occupy has accomplished little except to divide the communities in which it has operated and has successfully turned attention from the issues to becoming an issue itself.

It chants that it represents the 99% but in fact, in terms of hard core support, Occupy draws fewer people across North America than work on Wall Street or attend a Justin Beiber concert. In other words, Occupy is less than the 1% and the cost is out of all proportion to its contribution to the issues, to our communities or to the reality of what it has accomplished.

Today in Ottawa, the best Occupy could do was to align itself with a march organized by others to support the protests in Syria and Egypt. It hasn’t got an original idea or reason to exist since it lost its meager tent city and must now look to piggyback on the protests of others. It’s the same with Occupy protests across the continent. The tent camps were their real raison d’être and without them, they really don’t quite know what to do with themselves. They've moved all over the map from criticizing Wall Street to trying to align themselves with causes as varied as the environmental movement, housing foreclosures and the protests in Egypt and Syria,

There are a few notable exceptions, of course, and there remains some committed and even honorable people who have and who continue to support the Occupy movement or at least its ideals but they are few and far between. For the most part, this remains an extend fit of unfocused anger about the state of their lives and what they perceive as injustice.

Not knowing what else to do about it, they took to the parks and set up camps. In the end, they disrupted the lives of those they claimed to support, made a mockery of our laws, trampled the rights to freedom of speech and assembly of  anyone who did not agree with them, vandalized and damaged our cities, drew crime to their camps and then left the garbage behind when they were evicted.

I support the right protest and always have  but I oppose hypocrisy and those who are careless with the rights and safety of other people. Eight died in Occupy camps, that in and of itself is reason enough to oppose this protest movement but the simple fact remains that Occupy has been little more than an unfocused temper tantrum for some and an orgy of self-importance for others. In the end, it has been a hissy-fit that Occupy and its supporters have left the 99% to pay for while they continue to scramble to search for reasons to justify their existence. I am opposed to the arrogance behind that.

If Occupy has taught us anything, it is that complacency is our own undoing. Our city governments should have acted sooner and probably would have, if the majority had not been too quick to trivialize and dismiss Occupy as harmless or too busy to focus on the simple reality that Occupy was more symptomatic of the problems we all face rather than a possible resolution of them.

In the end, I can't escape the idea that Occupy was not a harmless and idealistic exercise nor can I overlook the fact that it is the rest of us who are supposed to pay for what Occupy has done. 

 © 2011 Maggie's Bear

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