I Quote Donald Rumsfeld: Democracy is Messy.

I have a regular and ongoing exchange with a guy named Andy G on FB. Andy is a liberal Republican I think, or a conservative Dem. No matter, Andy provided the first fodder for some of what followed here on the blog because he posted something or other that sort of made my blood boil. If there is such a thing as a limousine liberal, Andy is the opposite. From the comfort of his perch Andy takes his shots against the protestors, and the left in general, all the while suggesting he is essentially for the cause, if only…

Anyway, I do sort of like Andy though I only know him through FB. A couple of days ago he posted a piece about the mess in LA after the Police cleared the Occupy sight there. For some reason it has drawn an enormous amount of response. Funny how that works sometimes.

What follows are some of the posts Andy put up, a link to the LA Times piece, and my response.

OH, PLEASE ... blame it all on the right? Give me a break! Civil protest is one thing, but there is absolutely nothing civil, respectful or decent about leaving your sh*t all over the place, I don't care who or what you're protesting! Don't hang this on the right, don't hang it on the rich. That's patently absurd.

Perhaps, Jeff, but I fail to see and no one here has successfully made an argument for why that justifies the wanton disregard for civility and why we all have to clean up such a horrendous mess. There's no defending it ... it's just wrong, plain and simple.

And frankly, if these demonstrations didn't turn from real protest to some sort of carnival, gypsy-esque commune type of encampment, we wouldn't be reading stories like this in the LA Times or anywhere else.

And our brothers and sisters, at least the ones who really weren't there for a real, legitimate protest, should have better manners ... that's all I'm saying. They want legitimacy and to be respected ... fine, no problem there, but act like.

So do I, Dan ... but we all end up footing the bill for those cleanups ... I'm supportive, but not when it costs society. How does that really add anything to what they're protesting? It doesn't. In fact, it actually tends to run counter to their whole objective. This needs to be thought through a little more by the actual OWS core base, since all this glomming on is likely causing a lot of the messes.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/occupy-la-30-tons-of-debris-left-behind-at-city-hall-tent-city.html

Jesus, Andy. What a priss. Is that you under all that shit you’re peddling? Do you really care they left a mess (as Jeff said someone else made the mess), or are you really just riding this thing because you have generated so much feedback.... No criticism there, I would be thrilled if there were 50 responses to a post of mine, but I would have to say less so if 38 were mine. 

 This is not right vs. left thing; or rather it is, but only to the extent that the right is now completely identified with and beholden to wealth. The talk about footing the bill of the physical clean-up of an encampment which was cleared with little warning or care for people’s personal possessions (Same thing happened in NY too, with similar results) is preposterous. Especially in a week where we learned that the Fed spent $7.7 f***ing trillion bailing out the banks, and later colluding with them to keep it secret, your outrage seems sort of misplaced. 

Your paean to the costs to the taxpayers sounds like a Romney-esque poll-tested and totally hollow response to the movement. Say this much, and frame it that way, and then everyone will believe I am sincere. What utter horse shite!

 Please identify for me the method of protest that you would find acceptable to confront the power structure. This group of people is literally is so far removed from the larger community on which they feed like friggin’ eels on a carcass that they could not identify a real American with a magnifying glass and a polygraph. If the Occupy kids dropped a deuce on the desk of the Chairmen of Wells Fargo, I would not consider it inappropriate or ill advised, and it seems to me that that the gleaming exterior that these bastards have has sort of hidden the result of their greed driven activities. A tattooed thug holds up a liquor store, running off with a few hundred and society gets behind the idea of punitive incarceration. But these bastards literally stole billions, and they continue to game the system using the profits of their ill-gotten gains. Bloomberg reports the banks made a cool $13 Bil from the action of the Fed.

Your response, “Hey look at the mess those kids made! Am I gonna have to clean that up?” F***! Really?

 I know you are well informed enough to know that the cause has merit, but increasingly you look to me like the white preachers that King wrote to while he sat in a jail in Birmingham after being gassed by the police. Those preachers knew King’s cause was just, but they just wished he had done something that would have been less confrontational. Sound familiar?

Jesus, Mike, sounds like you don't really give a shit that these protestors left all their shit lying around in the name of protesting. Are you any kind of an environmentalist? Give me a break! You keep trotting out the same old tripe about... this being a war on Wall Street, and I'm fine with that part. What I'm not fine with is people abdicating their basic civility to the rest of us and wantonly messing the joint and then saying it was all part of the protest! That dog doesn't hunt and all your ranting at me does NOTHING to justify why that kind of trashy behavior is acceptable! It's not and I still say it lowers the movement's credibility. Let's also not forget that OWS isn't and can't be wholly about the 1% and the banks. Some of that 1% are very high paid public employees, professors and other elitists who have nothing in common with the other 99% of us.

Andy, No I don't give a s*** how much debris was left down there. Last year after the ball dropped in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The next day the Sanitation Department cleaned up the mess, just as they do every year. There was 40 tons of mess, making our revelers messier than your occupiers by a factor of 33%! Yeah, we win!

What a load of… jeez, I don’t know. Occupy is a protesting in reponse to the betrayal of tens millions of people by the political and business structure in this country. They are mostly kids, organized primarily to the extent that they distrust leadership at any level, so much so that they have completely disowned it. As someone in their fifties that's quote a legacy to ponder.

 As I said I would consider it a totally legit form of protest if a couiple of Occupy kids dropped a deuce on desk of the Chairmen of Wells Fargo. Jamie Dimon made $20 million, plus last year, they should drop two there. To their credit Occupy has shown up at Obama events across the country, but mostly hit financial institutions and Republicans. They followed the money (and this is sort of where it led).

I have made a good living for years and I do pay taxes. I am a businessman. Have been for 30+ years. I am not a socialist, though the recent suggestion someone made against me to that effect was amusing. I vote in almost every election, but millions of other Americans I am really angry. I am also pretty well informed, and so not just responding to the lost chapters of my youth. The issues Occupy is raising are the real deal. Big money corruption is rotting the soul out of both parties, and I  have made my feelings about that that clear both on this site and on the postings on my blog.

I seek neither violence nor retribution, but I have a deep desire to find justice, and to equal the playing field for the most vulnerable in our society. The political and financial establishment don’t care yet about me, or what the Occupy crowd is doing. They faint a little here and there, but they don’t really don’t care.

So we are in a war of attrition. Does this movement, perhaps the most important in our lifetime, certainly since Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, have the tenacity to stick around long enough until based on people’s discomfort, either to their routine or perception, they do start to care?

I continue to be amazed at the level of corruption of which you are well aware, and see that the only thing that gets you and millions of other fence sitters riled up over is silliness, whether the “fake” mess reporting’s in LA and Portland, or the unruly behavior resulting --at least in NY-- with arrests for people spilling from the sidewalk.

They f***ed you Andy, you and everyone else, who works hard, plays by the rules, and pays their taxes. The people at the brunt of these protests did not.

And in a self-perpetuating cycle the bastards invested some of the ill-gotten gain into running ads and on public relations gambits to convince enough of you and people like you, that they didn’t do anything bad. Their paid mouthpieces on Fox News and elsewhere bring us their phony outrage, and raise the smoke level. They hope America will forget the damage done. Perhaps they will. As with everything else, the right finds a way to get indignant for behaviors previously tolerated when it fits the argument they hope to make. Now they are upset about deficits, but a few years ago they funded two wars by selling bonds to the Chinese and spent $5 bil a day doing it. Pardon me if I feel the credibility has leaked out of the hot air balloons over there.

“When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out.” Abbie Hoffman