How to spot an occupier: the bad

As respected members of the mainstream media, it is our duty to teach you how to look out for the occupiers. What are the occupiers? It’s hard to explain, since they make up 99 percent of our population and come from radically diverse backgrounds, but here are some sweeping generalizations that will help you identify the occupiers.

1. Cunning use of self-made or modified clothes. The occupiers are anti-capitalist. They hate the system that has brought us great things, such as the recession and last Friday’s $1.11 Big Macs. They prefer to live within their own means and support each other. However, please do not confuse this with fiscal austerity.

2. The slack-jawed gaze. From an aggregation of recent news clippings, it seems they want stuff. What stuff do they want? Well, we’re not entirely sure. Without an official leader to talk to, we would need to ask 99 percent of the population about their feelings. Instead, we have taken funny pictures of them out of context and interviewed only the most degenerate-looking ones. Occupiers also hate things. These things range from showers to Citizens United.

3. Bruises from clashes with police. For being composed of such a bunch of whiners, the Occupy movement is strikingly violent, and its members like to get arrested. Within the first 30 days of protesting, there were more than 1,500 arrests. Compare that to the more docile and respectable Tea Party movement that has seen only 50 arrests in three years. The occupiers don’t respond to pepper spray or rubber bullets like normal protesters.

4. Ironic protest sign. For a protest that wants itself to be taken seriously, occupiers seem to enjoy making a mockery of the classic American protest sign. The occupiers took everything they liked about quickmeme.com or imgur.com and took it to real life. They forget that protests are not about “liking” things or “upvotes” — it’s about yelling loudly and pretending to accomplish things before you leave in a timely fashion.

5. General lack of personal hygiene. Are they homeless or just unclean? Recent polls of the Occupy movement report that 70 percent of the protesters are employed, compared to 56 percent of Tea Partiers.  However, we in the media would suggest this is misleading. To us, their real job is just complaining.

They complain about not having a good-paying job or how they have an unsustainable amount of student loan debt to pay off. We in the media would like to remind them they had a chance to get into a lucrative career in corporate finance, but they didn’t.

­— nicjacob@indiana.edu