Occupy Bloomington, more than just a good time?

Walking by our local manifestation of the Occupy movement, I was struck with the silliness of it all.

I saw a small crowd, maybe 30 people or so, hanging out, enjoying the autumn breeze, playing with a dog and displaying along Kirkwood Avenue the fruits of their labor: dozens of pithy messages scribbled on cardboard scraps to inspire or amuse the passersby.

Political protesting has never been so fun.The concept of Occupy Bloomington makes less sense than that of Occupy Wall Street. In New York, people are at least protesting within proximity of the soulless and greedy 1 percent.

In Bloomington, they are…having a good time?

Protesting the closest bank within reach, or maybe just the concept of a bank Having a slogan competition Seeing how many tents they can cram into People’s Park? They, like their comrades in New York, want to bring about change to the current financial system, but surely there is a more effective way to do this than spending peaceful afternoons listening to Old Man Jones playing Peter Seeger songs on his harmonica.

Even the original Occupy Wall Street protestors, while they seem to be more legitimate than their Bloomington comrades, are guided by a misplaced sense of outrage. They are protesting Wall Street’s involvement with the government and the government’s unfair bailing out of banks and other financial institutions.

The common denominator here is the government.

Why protest the banks that received the bailout and not the entity that gave it to them? Why protest those who use the current financial system to their advantage and not the authority that created such a system to be manipulated?

And the icing on the occupied cake is the Los Angeles manifestation of the movement. One speaker at the Occupy LA movement had these words of wisdom for the crowd.

“Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. “French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody. India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.”

To summarize: Nonviolent civil disobedience bad. Bloody revolution good. This call for violence should not come as a surprise coming from the Los Angeles chapter of the Occupy movement.

LA is so depraved, people there sent a man at a Dodgers game wearing a San Francisco Giants jersey to the hospital. But what can one expect from a city that worships at the feet of Kobe Bryant?

Such absurd and drastic rhetoric is to be expected from the Occupy movement, as the only thing really unifying the protesters is a feeling of outrage. Before the Tea Party was able to articulate specifics about its anger and identify politicians who represented its beliefs, it, too, attracted a good many colorful supporters who shared the movement’s misgivings and anger but also kept to some very marginal and ridiculous ideas.

Even still, the Tea Party is weeding some of them out. Michele Bachmann has proved to be a very stubborn weed.

It is clear that if anything is going to be permanently and effectively occupied, the movement needs to clarify and refine its goals. But it’s so much easier to toss a Frisbee.

­— sdance@indiana.edu