A Crime Has Clearly Taken Place Here: Thoughts On the Police and The Occupy Movement

The cops are not happy with many in the occupy movement. I know that because I know some of them. They find the people at these protests unpleasant. The occupiers swear at them, spit at them, and are just  generally unpleasant. They feel the occupiers treat them like they are paid hirelings for the 1% and without the respect they should. There are too many policemen who identify with those who are trying to destroy their pensions behind closed doors. They'd like to believe they have more in common with those in the upper class but one day, in the not so distant future, they might soon find that they're not nearly as upper class as they think. It reminds me of the old Jay Gould line about "hiring half the working class to kill the other half."

One guy at a party, with a big dumb laugh, asks the off duty cop, next to me "Did you smash any of those occupiers heads."

He then said, "I'm tempted to throw something in the middle of the Occupiers or drive my truck at them and watch them scatter."

It was all I could do to ask him what his plan was to fix the economy. I'm sure he wouldn't have been stupid enough to see the same thing happen again and not to try to do anything about it. I'm sure if I had I would have had heard nothing but dumb silence, and the sound of crickets. I feel like telling him doing nothing about the economy is really not an option. It brought me back to the old Don Henley line about "a man with a briefcase can steal more than a man with a gun." I'd just add one more line to it, he can get away with it too.

It made me feel as if there are still too many people out there working hard against their own interests, who won't be content until the whole country descends into civil war and anarcy? Will they keep siding with the thieves who stole the money from their pension plans - BOA, Citibank, Wells Fargo etc. - ran the economy into the ground and then billed them again for the tax dollars needed to stabilize the economy. They instead go against their own people who have really done nothing to them. Their big complaint. as far as I can tell, is  that too many in the Occupy movement don't have jobs and that they're dirty. It is a huge generalization and stereotype, that ones in power with access to television stations have helped to foster. I've also seen steel workers at these rallies, teachers, nurses and I've been there, and I'm older and tend to dress more professionally than the image.

 

White Collar Crime

At least the people who stole half the country's money have the decency to be well dressed while they're doing it. One question I never got to ask, because I wanted the party I was at to be a nice time and not the precursor to the civil war, is what makes anyone think that somebody who just stole a bunch of money and gets no consequences from it: won't do the exact same thing again. But at least they won't need a job and a bath. Tell the police to stay on the original crime and not to look for others. There was a crime here and we, the people who you supposedly serve, are waiting for you to solve it.