Occupy Wall Street needs to get its house in order

   by Roland Hulme

Rape. Suicide. Assault. Occupy Wall Street has proven this ain't no Tea Party.

Occupy Wall Street has become a shanty town

When the Occupy Wall Street protest began, I was in support of it - and quick to point out the apparent parallels between this movement and the right–wing's so-called Tea Party.

As the protests continued, however, I found myself less and less comfortable with those comparisons.

Don't get me wrong – I'm no fan of the Tea Party. I hated the illiterate placards and the glowering gun freaks with 9mms strapped to their thighs. Yet through it all, the Tea Party has remained resolutely, disturbingly civilized in their "civil disobedience."

Not so the so-called "99%".

Despite them having very legitimate complaints about the "1%" – such as the way corporations now enjoy civil liberties homosexuals don't, and how in the height of a recession the rich have got richer while working Americans go hungry – the way in which these formerly peaceful protests have devolved is revolting.

• In Zuccotti Park, in New York, protester Tonye Iketubosin was arrested for raping one female protestor, and sexually assaulting another. 
• In Texas, a 14-year-old protestor was raped by a convicted sex offender at Occupy Dallas. 
• Two men have been shot to death at Occupy protests (one self inflicted, the other as part of a gunfight.) 
• In Washington D.C., a mentally ill man who'd camped out with the Occupy D.C. protestors took potshots at the White House with an assault rifle, and is still considered "at large" by D.C. police.

You can say what you want about the Tea Party protests – and I myself compared the protestors to brownshirts, so I'm certainly as guilty as anybody in maligning them – but you'll notice there was nothing comparable going on at any of those events.

Nobody died at a Tea Party protest. Nobody got raped. The police didn't need to wade in with tear gas and steel batons (although given how many of the Tea Party were packin' heat, maybe that was a wise decision.)

There's uncomfortable irony in the fact that the Tea Party carried more firearms than an African militia, but it took a member of the Occupy crowd to start shooting at the President.

Despite all the accusations of racism, of misogyny and of "creating a climate of fear", the Tea Party look positively progressive in comparison to the chaos the Occupy movement has spread throughout city centers across America.

The fact is, the Occupy Wall Street movement need to get their house in order. Quick.

Because the more these organized "occupations" devolve into messy shanty towns, and the more these peaceful protests turn into violent riots, the more the original point the movement was trying to make will get drowned out.

At the beginning of the protest, people were genuinely interested in what the Occupy Wall Street movement had to say (even if it was occasionally idiotic.) America actually listened, and the concept of the 99% resonated with a broad audience.

But now, people are more interested in reading about the chaos, misery, violence and crime that the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have embraced; rather than what it is they supposedly stand for.

That makes their protests futile - and has turned Occupy into the enemy, leaving the "real" bad guys - the so-called 1% - free to continue abusing the system as they have been doing for decades.