'Occupy' Protesters Are More Than Just Hippies

The Occupy protesters might bring to mind images of 1960s hippies at first glance, but they have the potential to create a dramatic, important movement. Gene Lyons writes in his new column, “Occupy Wall Street’s Not Woodstock”:

In politics, it’s tempting to turn matters of temperament into matters of principle. Having disliked the hippie-dippy mellow aggression of the 1960s, my first instinct was to dismiss the Occupy Wall Street movement as feckless left-wing tribalism — as unlikely to survive the winter’s first strong cold front as the black flies pestering my cows.

Conservative by nature, I dislike big cities, and tend to avoid crowds. Even in my 20s, I’d no more have joined the drug-addled migration to Woodstock than volunteered for sex-change surgery. We spent that week in Dublin, visiting Jonathan Swift’s tomb — the 18th-century Irish satirist who took a dim view of human nature.

Everything else being equal, all it might have taken to put me off Occupy Wall Street was a widely circulated photo of an overweight Jerry Garcia look-alike wearing nothing but a loincloth, dancing barefoot and tootling on a flute.

That said, things are very far from being equal — or even halfway fair.

Which partly accounts for the near-hysteria on the Fox News/Limbaugh right. To them, the guy with the flute is no harmless eccentric, but a terrible threat. An excitable columnist in my local newspaper, Mike Masterson, described Occupy Wall Street protesters as an “unwashed, whining, smelly mob occupying and infesting Wall Street.”

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

President Biden Signs Spending Bill To Avert Shutdown, Urges Ukraine Aid
President Joe Biden with First Lady Jill Biden as he signs gun and school safety legislation

WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law a $1.2 trillion spending package, keeping the U.S. government funded through a fiscal year that began six months ago.Biden described the package, which Congress overwhelmingly passed in the early hours of Saturday, as investing in Americans as well as strengthening the economy and national security. The Democratic president urged Congress to pass other bills stuck in the legislative chambers.

Keep reading...Show less
January 6 riot

Police munitions explode as Trump supporters riot at US Capitol on January 6, 2021

Photo by Leah Millis/REUTERS

It may come as a surprise to hear that I actually agree with Donald Trump on something: America does have a two-tiered system of justice. In fact, you could say I beat him to it since I reached that conclusion long before the former president adopted it as his mantra.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}