Occupying Seven Deadly Sins

by Rusty Weiss

A friend of mine was recently opining on Facebook, in the midst of the Occupy Albany movement announcing plans for a Black Friday flash mob scene at the local mall – What are the Occupiers trying to get done? It is a question many people have been asking since the movement began.

Democrats, particularly Nancy Pelosi, would have people believe that this is simply a wonderful grassroots citizen movement, people exercising their freedom of speech, holding banks and corporations accountable, and spreading peaceful socialist messages of a perceived attainable utopian economic society. It is not.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement amounts to nothing more than making excuses. Excuses that legitimize a platform of laziness and entitlements, excuses to act in a lawless manner, and excuses for snubbing basic principles of civil discourse.

After pouring through reports coming out of the Occupy movements in D.C., Portland, Boston, Oakland, and on, and on, what the protesters most closely resemble becomes quite clear. Seven basic attributes define the movement in its entirety.

Wrath

The wrath of the protesters seems to be aimed mostly at big banks and corporations, though some have certainly expressed anger for other reasons. The rage though, has simply grown out of control. Witness…

  • Police officers being slashed with sharp objects, and having chemical irritants thrown in their eyes.
  • A clean-up of Zuccotti Park which yielded “knives and other potential instruments of violence in flower beds throughout the public space.”
  • A 78-year-old woman suffering a bloody nose, cuts and large bruises after she was knocked down some stairs at a protest in D.C.
  • A protestor throwing a fit of rage because employees at a McDonalds refused to serve him free food.
  • Flags burned, ATMs overturned, and occupiers hit by cars in the street at a gathering in Oakland.

Worse, there has certainly been a tangible element of anti-Semitism at the protests.

Jewish citizens have been berated and slurred many times over. Here are a few examples of the Occupiers anti-Semitic wrath (h/t Zombie):

  • A Jewish man being called the N-word in Zuccotti Park.
  • Another Jewish man being labeled a “dumb mother______” whose people own “schools” and “government buildings”
  • This gem of an individual claiming that Israeli’s lack heart because they are unwilling to blow themselves up in suicide attacks against Palestinians.

Greed

One mantra of the Occupy movement is their opposition to supposed rampant Wall Street greed. Hypocritical, when you realize their solution to such greed is to steal from those that have worked hard to attain their level of wealth, and give to those who refuse to reach such a work ethic. Money for nothing, a definite aspect of greed, seems to be no problem for the movement.

  • Donations to the Occupy Wall Street movement have ballooned to over $500,000 in October.
  • Protests have been joined by such 1 percenters as Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Kanye West, Alec Baldwin, and Anne Hathaway, seemingly unaware of their own wealth.
  • Jay-Z designed a line of “Occupy All Streets” t-shirts that were selling at $22 a pop, and rather than redistributing the wealth in solidarity with the people, opted to keep the profits.
  • Oakland protesters deposited $20,000 into an account at Wells Fargo, the country’s fourth-largest bank holding company.

Sloth

Indeed, nothing demonstrates sloth quite like having the ability to set up camp in a public park for three months while doing nothing. When Accuracy in Media delivered job applications and opportunities to the D.C. faction, the excuses for not taking employment were numerous, ranging from “Can’t work for… Defense”, “Getting a job won’t fix the system”, and quite simply, “We won’t do that”. As parents often tell their kids – If you worked half as hard on your job as you do at making excuses to get out of work…

Anyway, here is a list of other sloth-like activities to be found at OWS:

Envy

One staple of the Occupy movement is pure, unadulterated envy. They want what others have, and they want it without cost to themselves, either monetarily or based on time. They are envious of those with jobs, wealth, health insurance, homes, etc. It is the common attribute upon which all of the protesters rally around.

Pride

Pride can be identified as a desire to be more important or attractive than others, and failing to acknowledge the good work of others, a hallmark of the movement. Occupiers certainly have this latent desire to be identified as an important movement, comparing themselves to the civil rights movement, the struggle in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, and of course, to the historic protests in Tiananmen Square.

Gluttony

Two words. Michael Moore.

And not for the reason you may think.

OWS as a whole is not satisfied with having started a conversation about their principals in this country. The need to feed their pride has taken over, fueling a self-importance that must continue to grow through perpetual media coverage. Moore himself has openly expressed his opinion that the movement must continue to grow, encouraging the people to take their grievances nationwide, to grow ever larger.

Worse, Moore has essentially served as a spokesperson for the movement, while simultaneously living the lifestyle of a one percenter. He is gluttony personified.

Lust

Lust is generally considered to constitute an uncontrollable range of sexual thoughts or desires. The Occupiers seem to have an overabundance of this at their protests:

Despite this actually being a short list of incidences, the Occupy group in Baltimore issued a memo openly discouraging those victims of such attacks from reporting to the police. In essence, what happens at Occupy events, stays at Occupy events.

Is it fair to compare the entire movement to a certain percentage of participants committing such acts as the seven deadly sins? Perhaps not. But if we have to evenly distribute wealth and success throughout the populace, then the vices, excesses, and sins should also be redistributed.

Besides, it is, at the very least, more accurate than other comparisons being made (h/t Jawa Report)…

Rusty can be contacted via e-mail at weiss.rusty@gmail.com, or on Twitter @rustyweiss74


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Posted Nov 26th 2011 at 6:30 am in Culture, Occupy Wall Street | 93 Comments