Well that happened to me. As I looked at news story after news story of people getting arrested at Occupy Wall Street (OWS), um, occupations, I started to wonder, hey, did these sorts of mass arrests ever happen to the Tea Party? (Answer: no.) And then I learned that someone else, in this case the Daily Kos, basically made this point already.
Well, that may be, but it still begged the question in my mind as to why is this true, if it’s true? Why are scores of OWS folks getting hauled off in school-bus sized paddy wagons, and not the Tea Party folks?
This is despite the fact that The Tea Party protests have not always been, so to speak, a tea party. Lest we forget a Tea Party member stomped on a woman’s head.
Tea Partiers also gained great attention for their ability to obstreperously interrupt town hall meetings during the health care debate, and shout down those who disagreed with them.
Were there mass arrests due to these actions? No way. Unscathed would be one way to describe how they emerged. Kid gloves could describe how they were treated by those in power. The guy who stomped on that lady’s head, for example, Tim Profitt, got some probation. But he sure didn’t get beaten down by the police, as many OWS folks have, for less.
In fact when I Googled “Tea Party” and “arrested” here were some of the top searches that came up:
- A Tea Party leader was arrested for pirating software.
- A man was arrested for shouting at Tea Partiers.
- A Tea Party organizer was arrested for soliciting a prostitute.
- One Tea Party wingnut was arrested for threatening to turn a tax protest into a full scale massacre. He told the world about this via Twitter, of course.
Overall not much there. Now do the same search for “Occupy Wall Street” and “arrested” and these are some of the top searches:
1. 80 plus arrested in New York, just a few days ago.
2. Author Naomi Wolf, that menace to society, was also thrown into the hoosegow during an OWS protest. Better still, she was in an evening gown when she got busted, which surely made for interesting jailhouse banter. (Seriously, if anyone should have good reason to be angry at Wolf you’d think it would be pretty much limited to Al Gore.)
3. OWS protestors were arrested nationwide, in honor of the movement’s one month anniversary.
4. Some OWS protestors in Lower Manhattan made the trip to an outer borough, Brooklyn, and then got arrested. (Remember, not too long ago 700 OWS folks were also arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge.) My advice? Next time try the Manhattan Bridge.
And the list goes on, and on, nationwide, ad infinitum. Suffice to say, by this point at least a thousand OWS folks have felt the leathered fist of The Man, for asserting their rights to assembly, and freedom of speech. And they haven’t merely gotten arrested, but pepper sprayed, and in some cases beaten.
Have the protests gotten a little unruly? Possibly, but if you watch this video you will see a good deal of NYC police swinging billy clubs, and OWS folks not fighting back. Most, it seems, crowded the police not to hurt them, but to get a better line of sight for them to document the melee, including one guy with an iPad. (Darn you OWS, with your hypocritical fixation on modern conveniences!)
One can’t help but get the feeling that OWS just doesn’t get it. If they had only yelled down an opposing congressperson, or stomped on a woman’s head, all would have been forgiven.
Now, I scratch my head as to why this double standard has proven true. One answer could be that Tea Party demonstrators are way better armed.
This would highlight the fact that law enforcement is demonstrably good at bullying peaceful protestors, but not so hot when facing anything like equal force.
I would hate to think this is the case.
What are some other reasons? I am getting in the realm of speculation, but here we go.
Maybe the police feel more sympathetic toward the Tea Partiers, than toward the Occupiers. I don’t know why this would be so, seeing as how the Tea Partiers are totally against public sector employees, such as cops. (Although Tea Partiers become apoplectic when threatened with the removal of their publicly funded Medicare.)
Another possibility and what strikes me as more likely, is that OWS is doing something actually revolutionary, and this scares those in power that tell the police what to do.
This would only make sense as the Tea Party, for all its alleged anti-government language, is basically financed by people commonly referred to as pillars of society. Now these pillars may resent having to pay into the public kitty, despite reaping outsized gains from the benefits of our society, but they are still extremely powerful. The Koch brothers, for example, control one of largest privately owned firms in the U.S.
And the average Tea Partier tends to be older, wealthy, and white.
These are the people that Richard Nixon once called the Silent Majority. These are people that go home after disrupting town hall meetings, they don’t camp out. Although as of the past few years they haven’t been all that silent, and it’s arguable that they are still the majority.
This says to me that OWS is actually treading on dangerous ground, because it’s onto something. As Gandhi said: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.
So, the next step? As a wise man once said, duh, winning!
This also says to me that the Tea Party, though they love to talk a revolutionary game, and have a fondness for groovy tri-cornered hats, are not revolutionary at all. And this makes some sense. What’s so revolutionary about basically taking the Republic Party and going it one step further? Taxes are bad? How about no taxes? Unions are bad, how about abolishing unions? None of these positions are new, or threaten the general direction our nation has been headed in for 30 years.
The violence against OWS tells me that what they are up to actually scares those in power, in a way the Tea Party never did.
Or, you know, maybe the police just hate long-haired hippies. Can’t count that out, I guess.
But I’m guessing it’s the former.
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