Like an unquiet ghost or perhaps a renewed outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse, Occupy Wall Street has risen again, according to CNN. But, instead of camping out at Zuccotti Park in Midtown Manhattan near the financial district, the motley coalition of leftists, entitlement-addled millennials, union thugs, and aging sixties radicals are coming together to get Bernie Sanders elected president of the United States.
Thus far the effort involves traditional canvassing and encouraging like-minded voters to go to the polls for the New York Primaries. A march is to occur on Saturday, April 16.
No current plans exist to re-establish the encampment at Zuccotti Park that became so celebrated and reviled in late 2011 before winter and internal back biting broke up the movement.
Occupy Wall Street was, in many ways, the mirror image of the tea party movement. Whereas the tea partiers were mostly middle-class people who were outraged by overreaching government, the occupiers were enraged that government was not doing enough to punish the rich and to give everyone else free stuff. In a way, Bernie Sanders is their perfect leader as he wants to do both.
The behavior of the two movements was vastly different. The tea party was the first protest movement that left the venues of their rallies more pristine than how they found it, assiduously cleaning up after themselves.
Occupy Wall Street urban camps rapidly devolved into toxic waste dumps where the science of hygiene developed over thousands of years had been forgotten. Women ventured out at night at their peril, so infested were some of the camps with rapists taking advantage of the darkness and disorder. Violence erupted between occupiers and the police in Oakland, California.
Occupiers often harassed passersby, from stock brokers to school children.
Fast forward nearly five years and the resurrection of Occupy Wall Street as the shock troops of the Bernie Sanders for President Campaign has become a cause for both bemusement and alarm. Will the old habits of disorder and violence return? How will the real “99 percent”, those being Americans who view such antics with mixed amusement and horror, react?
All in all, just when one thought Election 2016 couldn’t get any weirder, it suddenly does.
