In a blog entry at Politics in Color, Wayne Dawkins gives a brief history of uprisings in the past and essentially declares that people who are annoyed or angered by the Occupy Wall Street movement should get used to it. He says that bullying and violence will not chase away protesters; they will only embolden the movement.
So in Oakland, crowd control means tear gassing Occupy Wall Street-West demonstrators. Dozens of Atlanta demonstrators — the southern flank — were arrested too.
For now it looks like the Midwest flank — Chicago — is not being hassled too much. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is just as annoyed as Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, but both leaders appear to understand that they earn no public relations points if they unleash the cops as the protesters remain peaceful and simply an inconvenience to other citizens.
The demonstrators' purpose is to inconvenience and annoy citizens so they pay attention. Lives and livelihoods have been ruined because of corporate greed and feckless behavior. It was time to take a stand and lead a siege.
Read Wayne Dawkins' entire blog entry at Politics in Color.