The 99% Spring

As spring rolls around, we are once again forced to put up with the foolishness that was the Occupy Movement last year. While this group had legitimate grievances, their protesting turned into a sort of whining miasma of petulant protesting for the sake of protesting - like an entire movement made up of three year old temper tantrums. Needless to say, the whole Occupy Movement needed a time out, and that's exactly what we've all be enjoying over the winter months.

 But once again, spring returns and the Occupy Movement is back with a new slogan - the 99% Spring. Hopefully, their winter was a fruitful one and a time for reflection and a new strategy. Here are a few suggestions that I have for the movement on ways they can actually achieve some sort of progress.

First - DO NO HARM. I've always considered this tenant of the Hippocratic Oath to be a good first step for just about anything in life. If you can move forward without going backwards, you are making progress. The most effective protesting is always peaceful protesting. See Ghandi, Martin Luther King, etc...

Second - ACHIEVE SOMETHING. There are SO MANY THINGS that are wrong out there - pick one. Figure out a way to protest it, keeping the first idea in place. And then protest the heck out of it. In the past week, I've read articles about a Minnesota Hospital that replaced its front line staff with bill collectors so that it could collect on debts from people trying to access health care at their emergency room. What?! Seriously? I'd have an Occupy Movement right on their freaking lawn! Or how about the article the other day that talked about the sleazy, immoral, and probably illegal tactics of all these mortgage companies and banks doing robo-signing on foreclosure notices? How hard could it be to stage large peaceful sit-ins in their lobbies and parking garages? If nothing else, moving the Occupy Movement away from large family friendly parks and into places where these evil and immoral things are actually being done would also move the focus away from the protestors and towards the things being protested.

Third - GO HOME WHEN YOU'RE DONE. Look, even Jesus rested from time to time. MLK didn't constantly march on Selma. Ghandi didn't incessantly criss-cross India by foot and his hunger strikes rarely lasted more than a few weeks. At some point, you have to give the protests a rest and let people take a deep breath, so that they can agree with you and try to figure out how to correct these evils. If you are constantly protesting, then people are spending all their time trying to figure out how to make you stop protesting, not figuring out ways to actually address the issues you are bringing up.

These are my three simple suggestions to the Occupy Movement and the 99% Spring. I, henceforth, wash my hands of these radicals and loons... unless they should actually take some of these suggestions to heart.