I think you are holding your breath for this to become generation E's great moment. (Generation Entitled in case you didn't get that). You know, their Woodstock, their Berkeley, their Kent State. I think even Max Yasgur would ridicule these aimless people.
I'm not begging for military style crowd control tactics to be applied to a peaceful protest, if that's what you mean. But that's why I posted that pic from Birmingham. Over the top responses by authorities almost always turn public opinion toward a given movement, especially if the movement is obviously peaceful. Doesn't get much more casually brutal than that cop at UC Davis, strolling up and down a line of sitting protesters, spraying away. No matter how you slice it, that's a PR nightmare. Or like the pepper spraying of that 84 yr old woman in NY, or the rubber bullet to the Iraqi vet's head, or etc etc. These kinds of things will continue to add up, just as they did for MLK -- or even Gandhi, who was the father of these protest tactics.
Personally? I'm in a quandry about Occupy. The left needs help and has for a decade at least, if not since Clinton. The official reps in the government are unorganized, fractious, bought off, and almost entirely ineffectual. They keep getting punk'd by the GOP, and aren't sophisticated enough to even recognize that it's happening, much less launch a coordinated counterattack. In short, the Dems suck at paying back their base, playing effective politics, or being thought leaders in anything at all. It's a bad situation.
The Occupiers are a strong expression of modern grass roots progressivism: their critique is solid and based on fact, and is also based on the idea of fairness, which has been the major activating idea behind all the great American progressive movements (Teddy and Franklin D both used fairness as their central themes). But they're relying on a model that is iffy (no leadership? each city controls its own movement? no specific platform?) and while it might be revolutionary (I've heard it compared to a programming API, a template for action rather than a thing in itself), it's also ripe for abuse. The Tea Partiers saw that pretty quickly. It also puts the Occupiers -- and most importantly, those sympathetic with the movement -- in the position of having to agree with with both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland. Just like the Tea Partiers didn't toss out the guys bringing automatic weapons to rallies, or the amazingly racist element at most of the bigger marches, the Occupiers have had anarchist factions, the homeless/mentally ill, and some petty crime.
I like the fact that they're energized, I like the fact that they're talking about what needs to be talked about, but I'm not sure they're going about it the right way and not sure that what they're doing can/will stay nonviolent. If it devolves into riots, the movement is done for. On the other hand, if we get tipped back over into recession (which could happen for a myriad of reasons, come of which we have no control over), the movement could grow.
