"Take that, you hippie scum!"
I haven’t kept up with the popular comics for decades and names like ‘Frank Miller’ don’t mean that much to me — I have vague notions of who he is based on movies like ‘The 300’ and I know he is credited with breathing new life into the Batman franchise. So I wasn’t in the loop when news broke of Frank Miller’s diatribe against the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement.
Miller had this to say: “The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.”
I want to ask Mr. Miller to explain why he thinks that citizens assembling and making their grievances known will result in harm to America. Isn’t the ‘right to assemble’ and all that other stuff really the central point of democracy? Our leaders certainly seem to like public demonstrations against the corruption of rulers when they occur in places like Egypt; why doesn’t Miller like them when they occur closer to home? If the Egyptians want to hold their rulers accountable for mismanagement, shouldn’t US citizens help the Egyptians on their steps to democracy by cleaning our own house, too? And, while there have been examples of vandalism, theft and other bad behavior at the Occupy protests, the number of ‘bad acts’ has been statistically insignificant. Some people misbehave whenever a hundred or a thousand folks gather in any place for any reason (including shopping on Black Friday). And, compared to the Penn State students who rioted when their favorite coach was fired, the Occupiers have been angels. Calling them “louts, thieves and rapists” is just inaccurate. There may be ‘louts, thieves and rapists‘ in the crowd at the Occupy assemblies, but they (we) did not assemble because they (we) wanted to behave badly. We assembled because our government and our economy has been broken by corruption and greed and neither the democrats nor the republicans are willing to try to fix it.
“Occupy’ is an effort to save democracy, not an attempt to tear it down. I’m surprised that Miller does not understand that.
(edited for sentence fragment)