As you may have heard, yesterday saw yet another Occupy Wall Street (OWS) confrontation with the cops.  This time the protestors attempted to storm the Smithsonian, of all places, to protest the use of unmanned drones by congregating in front of an exhibit in the museum.  The episode is quite comical, since attacking the Smithsonian is the absolute LAST thing you’d expect from groups which have been labelling the TEA Party as the “anti-science” group. 

Now, I’m a HUGE supporter of the public turning out and peacefully protesting the establishment’s mistakes, don’t get me wrong.  I love watching the massive, widespread exercise of the 1st Amendment as citizens rattle the bars on their cages,  BUT, as Glenn Reynolds said on Instapundit yesterday:  Bad Optics.  A movement needs the respect of the average voter, and getting arrested in confrontations with police in a museum full of families on vacation isn’t the way to go about gaining it.  I can promise you that actions like that are doing more to put the lie to the 99% claim as anything else.  No responsible, reasonable voter is going to want to associate with that sort of scene.

Here, check out the story from Yahoo.com:

Protesters clashed with security staff when they tried to enter a museum in Washington on Saturday, prompting one guard to use pepper spray and leading to at least one arrest, a spokeswoman said.

The incident occurred at The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum around 3:15 pm (1915 GMT), after hundreds of activists had marched from Freedom Plaza, near the White House, along the National Mall towards the US Capitol.

Some of those in the demonstration were affiliated with the Occupy DC protest group that sprung up earlier this week as a spin-off of the larger Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, angered at “corporate greed.”

While some of you are probably still scratching your heads over how “corporate greed” is best protested at a government run organization’s display of the government’s weapon systems, please allow me to point out what an important point that really is.

You don’t understand what they’re doing.  And they don’t either.

It isn’t making an awful lot of sense, is it?  You’ve got OWS members calling for getting rid of all debt, you’ve got some calling for larger levels of government spending which can only be funded by huge increases in debt.  The movement is a grab bag of mixed calls for a varied number of things. You’ve got factions calling for attacks on the banks, factions fighting for unions, factions fighting for Obama, factions fighting for bigger kleptocratic governance, factions calling for anarchy and the end of Western Civilization, all with no real, coherent game plan.

Not even a true mission statement. The lists of crap they consider their “demands” which we’ve seen published thus far are even more infantile than sophomoric, a myriad of conflicting, often irrational, demands for what this one little group, or that other little group, are baying for, like wolves howling at the moon.

The TEA Party, by contrast, has always had a simple, easy to understand, hard-to-deviate-from message.  It’s even built into the name so you can remember it without effort. Taxed Enough Already. Any claims which progress past the objection to higher taxes simply funding a larger kakistocratic government, managed by kleptomaniacs, should be ignored and discarded as a basic attempt to co-opt the efforts of the individual TEA Party member.

I know that liberals LOVE to claim that the TEA Party is 100% corporate sponsored, that we’re just tools of the 1%er’s, and not a grassroots movement, which to them explains why the TEA Party is so much better organized and effective, but that claim is utter nonsense.  My town’s three TEA Parties have all been funded by bake sales and a community raffle. Not one of us who attended ever received any money in payment for our attendance, though the rallies have featured a big BBQ, funded by the area churches, for the people who attend.

No corporation, nor group of corporations, could hire a million people to go to over 1,000 rallies, nationwide, in a single day, AND keep it completely hidden from the liberal press. Think about it. The scale of the thing alone puts the lie to that claim.

And that’s yet another problem. Liberals are trying to re-create the TEA Party, but they’ve never understood the movement, so they aren’t getting it right.  They’ve been so blinded by their hatred of all opposition that they’re incapable of rationally examining their opponent’s tactics and strategy.  They think the TEA Party is a corporate sponsored movement, so they’re creating an opposing union sponsored movement without realizing that they’re outnumbered by a true grassroots phenomena.

What will the OWS movement do when one particular special interest gains the upper hand?  Let’s say, suppose the pro-Obama forces, the unions and the college students, get the upper hand and try to turn the movement into a pillar of support for the corrupt status quo?  The true anarchists aren’t going to support them.  They want the destruction of the existing social order, not the growth of an already malfeasant organization which has used its power and force, more than any other group, to place our nation and civilization in such a precarious position.

Infighting will ultimately drag this movement apart unless something unifying, something which each and every member can rally behind, appears.  Heck, even the crowning of that group will lead to a schism with the rest of the disparate supporters.

As you have probably deduced, I’m not a big fan of much that the OWS is protesting.  I can get behind them on the banks, believe me, I’m just as upset as they are over the costs of the bank’s failures being shunted onto the taxpayer by a government with whom the banks have a thoroughly fascist relationship, but some of that other moonbeam-and-unicorn-shit Utopiean stuff they’re saying makes me want to claw out my own eyes when I read it’s rambling obliquity.  They’re not thinking about the consequences of their actions, the possible ramifications, as Mayor Bloomberg pointed out when he claimed they are trying to kill jobs, jobs which supplied his city, a liberal paradise, with the funds needed to function. 

They’re cutting each other’s throats.

Now, as I’ve said before, I love the idea that citizens, however misguided I feel them to be, are making their voices heard and protesting the injustice they feel is being perpetrated.  I get a real thrill out of watching anyone challenge the status quo, since, well, look at what the status quo has given us.  I want to see more OWS protests, more TEA Party protests, more protests period.  Then I want to see those motivated people at the ballot box every election.  A adherence to true civic duty is the only solution to our nation’s problem.

And in the interest of advancing that goal, I advise the OWS movement to do a three things:

1) Simplify your message.  You’re angry at the fact that people are being unfairly forced to cover the costs of other’s mistakes?  Great!  So is the TEA Party.  You’ll win a lot of support if you realize that you’re not alone and begin to tailor your message towards a specific end which pulls in broad support and no other.  Common goal, common effort.

2) Stop being emotional.  Emotion rules reason and bad things happen as a result.  Don’t get angry and lash out at the cops.  Those men are part of the group you’re claiming to represent.  They have families which they support paycheck to paycheck, their kids go to failing schools, and their budgets and jobs are being cut, just like your’s.

You’ll never recreate the TEA Party’s success unless you can rationally and reasonably explain your position without calls for killing American citizens, looting their homes and businesses, and then putting the torch to it all.

3) Be truly grassroots.  Stop bringing in the unions and other established special interests with known political agendas.  No one is ever going to believe you’re truly serious until you divest yourself of all your former ties to power and begin anew.  Scrap your previous connections to power, they’re already corrupted.  Scrap your previous systems of fund raising and PR, they’re already corrupted.  You must, like the conservatives in 2006 and 2008, be destroyed and rebuilt, Pheonix like, before you can attempt to force such a change on another group or organization.

It’s almost Zen-Bhuddist-like, but it’s highly effective and useful advice to constantly be seeking the true you.  You must have a firm foundation to be able to affect the movement of anything.

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