Whatever you may or may not think of filmmaker/activist Michael Moore — and we don’t have enough space to address that issue — he did make at least one important point when addressing the local contingent of the Occupy movement.
“If you see somebody who says they’re a member of this group trying to behave in a violent manner, you must surround that person with love and stop them,” Moore said Thursday, before heading over to the Tattered Cover to continue his book tour.
Moore was warning the crowd against the possibility of infiltrators turning to violence to make the movement look bad. But the more likely scenario is that troublemakers are in their midst for myriad reasons.
And though we don’t know for sure if love would help should behavior turn rowdy, we are sure that the Occupy Wall Street movement is the real loser if it allows itself to devolve into violence.
Violence in Occupy demonstrations in Oakland, Denver and elsewhere simply allows detractors to stereotype the protesters as engaging in violence for violence’s sake.
And it drives people away from the movement, as was the case earlier this week when a young woman described as a prominent figure in the Denver effort apparently walked away in response to escalating violence.
The Occupy movement is protesting what it sees as the power of the richest 1 percent to obscure the voices of the 99 percent. Images of spray-painted police cars or broken store windows do not make helpful points about, say, income inequality.
Many politicians have been shocked to see the support that polls show for the protesters. They’ve underestimated the Occupy movement just as surely as many underestimated the Tea Party.
Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has openly embraced the themes of the protests. President Obama has walked a careful line, trying to capture the spirit without embracing the protesters.
The goal of the protests is not, of course, to win the approval of politicians. The goal is to win the hearts and souls, as politicians like to say, of real people. For that to happen, the movement has to clean up its ranks.
We’ve seen what has happened in Oakland where large protests have, at times, turned violent. As a San Francisco Chronicle editorial put it, the enduring image of last weekend’s protest “will be black-masked vandals setting fires, tossing rocks and smashing windows.”
The true test of the Occupy movement will not be, as some have noted, its ability to take on the coming winter, although camping out in a Denver snowstorm is certainly test enough.
The true test will be whether, now that it has America’s attention, it offers up solutions that find popular support or if it is swallowed up by the troublemakers in its ranks.
