Michael Moore claims that the well-televised pepper-spray incident has become the Tiananmen Square moment for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He’s right. Further compounding this issue is Fox News claiming that pepper spray is just another food product!
Yes, the Occupy Wall Street crowd may have a muddled message, but what message does the law and order establishment send when you see police spraying docile, kneeling protestors as if they were azaleas with fungus?
The Occupy Movement couldn’t ask for a better metaphor than the image of their protestors sitting politely and submissively and just being abused mercilessly by someone standing over them with more power. Isn’t that what this movement is all about?
Let’s face it; many independent-minded Americans have been losing sympathy lately for Occupy protestors. Instead, their sympathies have been drifting back to local stores affected by protests, taxpayers for footing the cleanup and policing bills for the protests, etc. The video from UC Davis helps restore sympathy back to the protestors.
The beauty of the pepper spray video is there is no ambiguity. One side is 100% clear-cut evil and one side is 100% the innocent victim—it’s rare to get that much instant visual clarity anywhere outside of comic books much less on complicated national political/economic issues.
My advice to the Occupy Movement is to create 15 second commercials that do nothing but show the footage of the pepper spraying ending with the question “had enough?” Moveon.org, PrioritiesUSA and even the Democratic Party should graft onto this message and movement and use their collective steam to make it bigger.
On a side note, perhaps this issue will get people to take seriously the whole problem of incompetent law enforcement personnel. Entire legions of think tanks, 501 c 3s, and foundations spend fortunes each year pointing out the dangers of bad public school teachers who seemingly can’t ever be fired. Why are they the only public sector professionals to ever receive scrutiny? It’s time we realized that just as an incompetent teacher can destroy the lives of school children, incompetent law enforcement officials also exist and can destroy lives. It’s time to create a more systematic approach to weed out demonstrably incompetent law enforcement officials.