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.
It's not that obviously peaceful from clips we've all seen. Hate to tell you, it's not just Faux that's caught this, the same outlets who showed cretins in full open carry mode at Taxed Enough Already rallys
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.
You see your citations right there state the nostalgic "hippy victory" you seek: MLK, Ghandi
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.
They aren't unorganized. Rather our government looks like organized crime in the most classical sense. You keep blaming the GOP for all the perceived ills in the world and it totally escapes you that the Democrats are every bit as much to blame for where we are at these days economically and socially speaking. How do you lay every single problem at the feet of a strong GOP and weak Democrats?
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.
"Fairness", at least in the context you mention it implies that every other human is responsible to remunerate someone else for their own short comings, ineffectiveness, lack of luck, or just flat laziness, that's why it pisses people off so bad who have sensibility.
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.
Unless you were there at any of the protests, it's pretty hard to put into context why cops were spraying protestors at UC Davis...Well smile I started an intelligent sweep all reply and realized I need to go point by point. My words red text in your citation...
