“Tim McFallon, stood chatting with a shivering blonde, gallantly offering her his warm pea coat. “Let’s swap,” she purred as she discarded her own coat to reveal a long stretch of taut midriff underneath what could be loosely be described as a sweater.”’
A scene from Days of Our Lives or a Harlequin romance novel?
Neither.
It’s a scene from the Washington Post’s romanticized view of Occupy Wall Street which appeared on Page 1 last month. The Occupy movement is far from fanciful.
The movement has cost hard-pressed cities across the country millions of dollars that could have gone to feeding the hungry, preventing the layoff of teachers and firefighters, caring for the uninsured or repairing dilapidated roads and bridges.
The Washington Examiner reported last year that the DC Occupy movement was costing taxpayers $22,000 a day. That comes to $3.4 million since October. And that’s just DC, where according to the police union, crime has gone up in the city because police are being diverted from neighborhoods to the Occupy tent town.
The occupiers have assaulted police, destroyed public and private property, burned the flag, intimidated small businesses and their shoppers, closed down streets, disrupted meetings, erected barricades, defaced statues and monuments, and started fires. In Washington a man was arrested for abandoning a 13-month old child in the protesters encampment. One Occupy leader told the press that they have had problems with the homeless who have been attracted to the site for food and shelter, citing “mental illnesses that the group simply isn’t prepared to handle.”
When the U.S. Park Police finally got up the gumption to clean out the squalor in McPherson Square in downtown Washington this past weekend, they found dead rats and mice, bottles of urine, and a host of unsanitary conditions that had to be handled with hazmat uniforms. For their effort the officers were assaulted by the protesters, eight of whom were arrested.
And then there’s the promiscuity glamorized by the Post; the “cuddle puddles” and the jokes about the string of “Occubabies that may appear come June.” How romantic.
That is the Occupy odyssey. And for what? We are never really sure.
There has been much talk in the media about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. But interviews with occupiers themselves suggest some want the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Others say they are protesting for campaign reform. Still others apparently traveled with the Mayor of Washington and some of our council members to New Hampshire to lobby the legislature for DC voting rights. Still others say they are advocating for extension of unemployment insurance (wonder why?) and still others are against bank bailouts.
The media’s performance through the fall and winter has been embarrassing. They have feigned over the occupiers as though they were the second coming of the Revolutionary War patriots. Several studies discussed here previously, have documented the dramatic contrasts between coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement with respect to the amount of coverage and its biases in favor of the occupiers.
ABC’s drama queen, Diane Sawyer has treated the occupiers with soppy affection. She outdid herself early on as Brent Bozell recorded in this snippet from the evening news: “As of tonight, she pronounced, “it has spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries, every continent but Antarctica.“ Let pass the reference to 1,000 countries (there are only one-fifth that number), the exaggeration and hyperbole is astounding.
Two journalists have admitted to actively supporting the movement with public relations help. The Post has published extensive pieces favorable to Occupy in its news and Outlook sections. Just last month, the media gave heavy coverage, including time on the national networks, to occupiers marching on Capitol Hill, estimated to be anywhere from several hundred to two thousand but virtually ignored two or three times as many pro life activists who shoed up on the Hill just days later.
The Occupy movement has been embraced and protected by public officials who give it credence it does not deserve. Local District of Columbia councilman Jim Graham called the rants “important expressions of freedom of speech.”
It is nothing of the kind. That great pillar of our Constitution, which has promulgated and protected truly democratic free speech throughout our history, at great expense, shouldn’t be referred to in the same sentence with Occupy Wall Street. The occupiers have engaged in meaningless and frivolous protests and costly civil unrest for goals they can’t even describe. They talk of change, but there is no agenda that goes along with it. Change in the Occupy lexicon is simply a word, a vague slogan, ill-defined and uninspired. For a protest to have meaning, its slogans must have meaning; they must be borne of the courage of conviction and encapsulate a course of action that inspires or coerces those who govern to accomplish something specific. The media and good self-serving politicians have generously given more meaning to the movement than the movement.
We have tolerated the occupiers’ abuse of our freedoms for too long. It is time it ended. Their sympathizers will ask, what’s the harm? It’s simple. The abuse of freedom ultimately results in the loss of it.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.