By snoadmin
Five months after its strong start, the Occupy movement is still chugging along. It has lost a considerable amount of steam since it began in mid-September last year and recent Occupy events in California are painting an ugly picture for the movement. After dominating the media, the Occupy movement is on its last legs.
Occupy Wall Street started off as a vast showcase for the everyman to express his discontent of the financial inequality in the U.S. It was also a chance for people to show off how culturally savvy they are. You could practically feel the glee emanating from beneath Occupiers’s “V for Vendetta” masks.
The “We Are the 99 Percent” stance was a great platform to express the unfairness of the top one percent of earners in the United States controlling the majority of the country’s wealth.
It was a platform everyone could relate to which made the Occupy movement so popular among young people. We had not yet had our social movement to participate in, and when Occupy rolled around, it was our chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Everyone wants to say they fought for the betterment of their country. Occupy, at first, seemed like the way to do just that.
Instead, the Occupy movement was hot for a few weeks and slowly dwindled down without every really achieving anything. The Occupy movement as it is now, may as well not even exist.
Occupy Long Beach, while never one of the premiere Occupy spots, is basically a wasteland. In the early days of the movement, OLB would attract hundreds to its general meetings. These days it is uncommon for more than twenty people to attend.
Truthfully, Occupy Long Beach is more about helping to improve the community rather than just trying to stick it to the man. But, even with its more community-oriented approach, Occupy Long Beach could not hold on to its members.
The Occupy landscape is not as dismal as it is in Long Beach, though. On Saturday, 400 arrests were made in Oakland after Occupiers vandalized City Hall, broke into the building and burned an American flag. That is about as active as Occupy’s been in a while, but that is not exactly the type of activity Occupiers should be proud of.
But that is the other problem with Occupy. The movement never really found its footing. It started strong, touting the 99 percent message and uniting people to challenge the corruption within the U.S. But, it quickly lost steam.
Occupiers failed to find a lasting over-arching message and subgroups emerged within the movement that left it fragmented and ineffective. After a while, each group began championing their own messages and sometimes resorting to violence and vandalism to communicate those messages.
State officials are getting tired of dealing with Occupiers, as well. Mayor Villaraigosa ended up evicting Occupiers in Los Angeles from their campsite and now officials at the National Park Service are imposing a ban on D.C. Occupiers. They will no longer be able to sleep at their site overnight. Only diehards will have a problem with not being able to sleep overnight, but the fact remains that people are getting tired of dealing with Occupiers.
We all saw it coming, but finally the Occupy movement is losing steam. It started strong, but after a lack of organization and a failure to create an over-arching message, the movement is slowly dying.
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