From Music to Arts festivals to NASCAR race weekends, events that span several days are very appealing and exciting for hard core fans. These kinds of events often allow fans and enthusiasts to camp out on sight and get a 24/7 fix of their favorite entertainment or pastime.
What’s to be noted about these types of events is the organization and preparation involved in successfully putting one together and having the majority of things actually go as planned. Spontaneity is not the optimum strategy for organizing an extended festival.
And as is the case with all extended festivals, there comes a time for the fun to stop and for everyone to pack-up and go home.
Can you imagine if musicians just kept showing up at Woodstock and the organizers felt compelled to just “go with the flow?” Would Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York still be “occupied” to this day by people attending a perpetual music festival? Can you imagine the mayhem that would have ensued when the local authorities decided it was time to turn off the music and evict 400,000 entrenched hopped-up hippies from a hillside in up state New York in the midst of the Viet Nam war era?
Fortunately, the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival did have a scheduled ending, and aside from a few burned-out stragglers, everyone packed up and left when it was over.
In stark contrast to the hundreds of Tea Party protest rallies that all had a beginning and an end, as far as anyone knows, there is no “scheduled” end to the OWS protests. And not having a scheduled ending could pose a huge risk for OWS host cities all across this country.
Interestingly, the OWS protesters have no reason to believe that OWS is ever going to end. OWS has become a perpetual festival of protests and confusion with the occasional spontaneous outbreak of the playing of instruments.
OWS protests are being treated by the mainstream media like the newest American political fad. Unfortunately, included within the many OWS protests around the country are; open sex, drug and alcohol use, accusations of rape, violence, anti-Semitism, theft, urinating and defecating in public, pan-handling, destruction of property, calls for killing and destruction, dozens of arrests and various other anti-social behaviors. What’s happening at some of these OWS protests should give rise to the mainstream media to consider where all of this could eventually be heading, but it seems the media is just to “into it” to be concerned about any possible negative outcomes.
So what’s going to happen when all these OWS host cities decide it’s time for the occupations to end? Will the entrenched “occupiers” leave gracefully without objection, or will they take offense at being told the party is over and refuse to leave?
We’ve all seen what typically happens around the world when the authorities eventually decide it’s time to disperse a protest or demonstration crowd, especially one that’s been allowed to grow and become entrenched for a prolonged period of time.
Allowing any protest or demonstration to organize and “occupy” a public place for a prolonged period of time, especially when the protesters are initially given leeway by local authorities to do so, will only embolden the occupiers to continue to hold their ground and eventually assume ownership of their new digs.
Once that assumption of ownership by the occupiers takes root, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for authorities to have them all calmly disperse. It’s unfortunate that the leaders of the host cities of all the OWS protests across the country didn’t anticipate the risk and possible danger of allowing “perpetual” demonstrations and protests.
We saw what happened in New York when the authorities tried to schedule a clean-up of Zuccotti Park where the protesters are camped out; there was a huge back-lash from OWS organizers and it was reported that: “
OWS organizers warned their supporters on Facebook that that the city’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg had used the ‘cleaning-up’ tactic to disband protests before. They also said that a similar ploy was used to dissolve protests in Europe.”
Organizers of this type of “occupy” protest strategy know full well that when the local authorities have had enough of the protests and demonstrations and begin disbursement procedures, there’s always a contingent of occupiers that will
refuse to leave without being forced.
And that is exactly what the OWS organizers have planned on from the beginning; a “
forced” dispersion by the authorities of OWS protesters for the whole world to see. Without a show of force by the local authorities to disband the OWS protestors, coupled with some sort of physical confrontation and possible violence, the OWS organizers know that their “cause” will be in jeopardy of not being accentuated and perpetuated by the media. OWS organizers believe that being openly forced by “the man” to do anything, regardless of who initiates the confrontation, will always help their cause; specifically because the media will provide wall-to-wall coverage and endless commentary of any confrontations.
What remains now is that OWS is spreading to possibly hundreds of cities across this country, each protest growing in strength and number day by day, and not one media outlet, political pundit or elected official seems to want to consider the inevitable question; will OWS end well?
