Ryan Wachter English 1102-058 Injustice The Occupy Movement The Occupy Movement has attempted to bring to light

t the economic disparity in the World. The idea was to set up a peaceful protest in New York to protest against the super elite of Wall Street. This first Occupy Movement was organized by the Canadian activist group Adbusters (Fleming). This first movement was fairly successful, until it spread. At it's roots, the Occupy Movement was peaceful and law abiding, nothing illegal (at first) was done during Occupy Wall Street. However, as the movement spread across the world, protestors did not follow proper procedures and ended up in confrontations with police forces. This inevitably lead to violence on the protestors part and ended up making the Occupy Movement very dangerous. Ultimately, the disorganization, the lack of an offered solution, and the violence stemming from the movement lead to the Occupy Movement instead of fighting injustice in the world, to becoming an unjust movement in and of itself.

The Occupy Movement was an organizational and logistical abomination. It has and had no clearly defined leadership and as such, no way of coordination. The protestors gather in a predetermined area, mostly through pseudo-organization from social media. Getting people to the protest is the easy part, providing for them is the hard part. The protestors end up forming shantytown-esque settlements that are not only illegal, but have very poor sanitary conditions. These settlements, once abandoned leave behind an enormous amount of trash and human waste that the protestors leave to the government to clean up. Costing, as of just November 25, over $21 to local and state governments to clean up the mess left behind. That alone is a gross social injustice. These protestors are fighting for economic equality, a good message by itself, but then

they degrade their message by causing damage to public property. Lack of organization is the main problem with the Occupy Movement, without a proper organizational structure, they have no way of policing themselves and ultimately end up stepping out of line. This then leads to the actual police forces stepping in to maintain the peace and to enforce the law. Obviously these protestors do not want to abandon their movement, so they fight back against what they perceive is the authority that is holding them down, the very thing they are protesting. This leads to a rather horrible slippery slope. Police have to break up these illegal demonstrations, people resist, police fight back, people raise an outcry of police brutality. These calls of police brutality is the very thing that is detracting from their otherwise pure message. Ignorance is absolutely flowing through in these allegations. If you fight a police officer when he is legally enforcing the law and then he throws you into the ground to restrain you, and you yell police brutality, that's pure ignorance. That then entices more people to fight the police, which then leads to needless deaths of protestors. That is injustice. Whenever ignorance leads to innocent blood being shed, that is the very essence of injustice. That does, however, lead to the question that if the police are enforcing unconstitutional laws; are the people right to fight back? Some protestors have tried to draw a parallel to the Civil Rights protests with the Occupy Movement, which is quite frankly disgusting. The Civil Rights movement was protesting unconstitutional laws and policies of the government. The fact that Occupy protestors would try to tie the tow movements together is an injustice as well. Occupy is not nt fighting unconstitutional laws, they are fighting laws they don't like. It's a terrible injustice when a progressive movement such as the Civil Rights movement gets dragged down into the dirt with the Occupy Movement.

The Occupy Movement has been protesting economic disparity, but they have never

offered a solution. They are simply crying out to the government to make the rich have less money and for the poor to have more money. Although that is a noble goal, I was always taught that you have no right to complain about something unless you can offer a solution to it.