Occupy Wall Street is No Tea Party

I've surreptitiously attended several Occupy Wall Street movement marches and encampments--both in Chicago and Denver.

But first a disclosure: I'm a Tea Party conservative. I've attended about a dozen Tea Party rallies and I've even spoken at two of them--and I have a three-cornered hat. Yes, I am that guy liberal mothers warn their kids about.

The Tea Party is focused. It's quite easy to summarize what it stands for--we favor smaller but more responsive government, lower taxes, and a strict adherence to the United States Constitution.

What I found at Occupy Chicago and Occupy Denver were anarchists, communists, sympathizers of the Palestinian cause, labor unions seeking to gain "street cred" from the young people who dominate the Occupy movement, Ron Paul supporters, and in Denver, the homeless. Chicago, unlike most large cities, never allowed Occupy tent cities.

There have been over 4,000 arrests at Occupy Wall Street events--I don't know of a single arrest at a Tea Party rally. Not one. The Occupy movement has been plagued by rapes, thefts, drug overdoses, and shootings. Tea partiers respect authority and the law, Occupy Wall Street protesters favor confrontation.

At the Denver tent city, I saw a couple of signs requesting money for marijuana purchases. One man--while a hand was in his pants--asked me if I wanted buy some "medicine."

At Occupy Chicago I asked a young Eastern European man why he was protesting.

"Less than less than one percent of people of the world own ninety percent of stuff," he replied in fractured English.

He told me he was unemployed, so I asked him if he was looking for a job. "No," was his answer.

Why not?

"I just like being in the moment."

Last Thursday I attended an Occupy Chicago march--where 46 protesters were arrested, by the way--and a woman wearing an SEIU hat was holding a sign that caught my eye. It said, "Fix our bridge." I asked her, "Which bridge." She replied, "They didn't tell me that."

Nothing much to see here folks, move on.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media keeps treating the Occupy movement seriously.

The occupiers do bring up one issue that gains my sympathy: the burden of high student loan debt while our anemic economy offers few attractive job prospects. Well, the unemployed ex-students should be protesting the colleges that graduated them instead--schools, almost without exception, that annually increase their tuition at an amount that exceeds the rate of inflation.

But there are jobs available. Waiting on tables may not be glamorous, but from there you can move up to management and perhaps become a hospitality industry CEO one day.

And join the "one percent," the wealthiest Americans.

It's the American way.

Anarchy may be fun for a while, but it doesn't pay the bills. And does anyone really want to sleep outside in the winter?