Occupy Squatters Don’t Know Squat

Katy Grimes: Four days ago, more than 300 Occupy protestors were arrested after breaking into Oakland’s City Hall. Demonstrators burned a U.S. flag, threw rocks and bottles at police, and tore down fencing at the convention center, and then tried to ‘occupy’ it.

Does anyone still believe that these are just frustrated, misunderstood ’99 percenter’ college students who fear they won’t be able to find employment upon graduation? Or that the protests and demonstrations are being orchestrated by “a cadre of infiltrators hired by Wall Street or some shadowy right wing cabal to discredit the Occupy movement?”

Columnist Peter Schrag, retired edititorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee does. In an op ed Wednesday, he stated that his theory may be a stretch, but then said, “but the real events amount to nearly the same thing.

Many in the media have provided cover to the occupiers since the movement began, and even have attempted to explain-away Occupiers’ bad behavior by saying that they are just a bunch of dumb kids who don’t know what they are doing.  The movement only seemed to sustain because of the media coverage, and media support. And then it grew legs.

If you think they are not a serious movement, I have some swamp land to sell you. The media not only gave cover to the movement, they gave credence to Occupiers’ demands.

“The demonstrators’ anger is understandable, but the more intense it is, the more carefully it has to be directed,” Schrag wrote in Wednesday’s Bee.

Scrag neglects to mention in his column that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, initially encouraged the occupiers, despite their muck, looting and arson. And Quan wasn’t alone. Prominent Democrats all over America stepped forward with support. Only in the new media were there reports of the Occupy movement being funded by labor unions, left wing financier George Soros, and even the Democratic National Committee.

However, after Saturday’s destruction derby inside Oakland City Hall, Quan appeared fed up with the pernicious protesting brats, and their leftist, nihilist friends. “People in the community and people in the Occupy movement have to stop making excuses for this behavior,” Quan said.

Quan might have included the media in her statement.

The Left’s Stale Playbook

Standard operating procedure for the far left is to use violence when they are losing the intellectual battle – it’s in the playbook, and taught at most public universities. Where the media provided cover for the Occupiers was in how the story was told from the outset; Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent groups made no secret of the fact that they wanted to force businesses to close. They tried to interrupt commerce with the Port of Oakland closure, an event Mayor Jean Quan said she was powerless to stop.

Spreading filth in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, disrupting and disturbing commuters was all part of the plan. Read the Occupy Wall Street website – none of this is a secret.

Media Responsibility

Where this gets weird is when news organizations overstep their responsibility and stop reporting the news, and stories are peppered with opinion. Or only part of the story is told.

Schrag however, is a columnist, and expected to opine, however off base he is.

“Why close the port, one of the city’s few major sources of income and a source of jobs to hundreds of truckers, dockers and countless other blue-collar workers?” Schrag asks. “Why trash little downtown shops and eateries as some did last fall? These surely are not the 1 percent symbolized by Wall Street. Why shut down the airport, as some are now threatening to do? What message is being conveyed there? How is Oakland preferable to Piedmont or Newport Beach where the rich actually live?”

After reading Schrag’s encouragement to the occupy protestors to “go where the rich actually live,” I fully expect to see ‘Occupy Laguna Niguel,’ or ‘Occupy Pacific Heights’ groups created.

It’s All About ME

Many of the middle class whiners doing the protesting are college students upset that they will have to work for less than $100,000 a year when they graduate. They say they shouldn’t have to repay student loans or mortgages. Where does thinking like this come from?

They’ve been told all of their lives how great they are, and how everything they do is wonderful. But who would hire them with such narcissistic, self-absorbed senses of self-worth.

And now the kids are angry.

The students who are protesting should be turning on the teachers and ‘educators’ who passed them every year to the next grade when they couldn’t read and speak English, or do basic math… and the coaches and parent volunteers who handed out first place trophies and blue ribbons to overweight kids with two left feet… and the parents wouldn’t dish out some tough love and discipline, fearing their children wouldn’t like them… In the world of the Occupier, everyone is a winner, except those who work for a living.

The rest of the occupiers, save for a few ideologues in every crowd, are the sloths of American society who believe that instead of working hard to make themselves successful, they are entitled to the things they want, and that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of them and provide for them.

The Occupy movement is playing right into the political left’s class warfare campaign. It’s a tired, hackneyed play, right out of the pages of famous leftists’ writings.

“Occupy, lacking a defined agenda, has become more about itself than about the nation’s paralyzing economic inefficiency and injustice,” Schrag wrote, and the only thing he does get right.

Ultimately, leftists are about selfishness, not selflessness. They are about control, not inclusion. They are about secrecy, not transparency. Leftists are agitators, and have been identified in history as socialists, communists and radicals, not moderates or conservatives.

Conservative by definition, is stable, sober, traditional, orthodox and steady.

Leftists are theorists and perpetual students, not teachers. And as Dennis Miller so aptly said, “They’re squatters who don’t know squat.”

FEB. 2, 2012



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