What you need to know about "Occupy Wall Street"

"What do we want?!?!"

"We're not really sure!!!"

"When do we want it?!?!"

"NOW!!!!"

Let us be honest: the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) miscreants camping out in public parks in various American cities are a collection of warmed-over 1960s retreads and other professional (and I use that term loosely) protestors with neither a clue or point. One might surmise that the ghosts of the Vietnam protests from Berkeley and Ann Arbor have come back to haunt us forty years later but in a farcical and ridiculous way. We should criticize Tom Hayden and the other Chicago terrorists from 1968 but we can say that the Port Huron Statement and Students for a Democratic Society were at least organized. What is happening now is beyond farce -- it is a smattering of pseudo-intellectual malcontents for all to see in something that uniquely fits the age of reality television.

Say what you want but in a county of three-hundred million, it is not to hard to find several thousand people who care deeply for just about anything. There are probably more Americans who care more deeply about Dungeons and Dragons than do about OWS. Parenthetically, when I lived in Nashville in the mid-1990s, there was a large group of people who would meet on Sundays in a local park and act out the various roles from D&D as we used to call it when I was a kid. I do not recall the press covering it in any meaningful way but I am sure they had a more coherent worldview than do the OWS protestors.

Today, the OWS generation could care less about the few thousand clowns who gather together to say everything or nothing. The peers of the OWS crowd are too busy playing video games, partying, posting on Facebook and tweeting nonsense. Even though it would appear all that they have is time, the teens and twenty-somethings have decided in virtual collective unison that they do not have time to take part in the OWS "protests."

But what is the story here? Why I am even bothering to record my thoughts on OWS? For one very simple reason: this is not the story of a protest movement, it is the story of a mass media concoction. That we are bombarded, day after day, by the banal machinations of a few tired and brain dead grad students (from interesting majors such as biological anthropology or evolutionary sociology, no doubt), is a testament to how the Press is an ideological tool of the Leftist, atheistic forces. Now that may not seem like a particularly novel point (I concede that), but that should be the story here, i.e., not "OWS hits a nerve among young people;" rather, "Media abets great fraud on American Public with OWS farce."

Contrast the few losers camping out against capitalism, which, as we know, have been showered with constant media attention and liberal handwringing in the form of opinion pieces and variety shows trying to divine the "true" meaning of the OWS "movement" to the pro-life movement. Today's media considers "deeply" the significance OWS from the silly -- trying to analogize the OWS protestors to the violent uprisings in the Middle East -- to the truly absurd in analogizing the OWS to an epoch-making event heralding a new age of citizen participation and socialist bliss. Whatever form it takes, and it is mostly ridiculous, it is nonetheless a seeming omnipresent consideration that we are subjected in today's world of the twenty-four hour news cycle.

By comparison, a half million people peacefully gather in Washington every January to protest the civil rights issue of our day -- abortion -- and they are utterly ignored by the media. The staying power of the pro-life movement is legendary: for nearly forty years, it has been a thorn in the side of those eugenicists among us who would have marched us off to the Brave New World. From the elderly woman praying her beads outside of any abortuary in any city in any weather to the Washington March, the pro-life movement is a real movement unlike a few unemployed hippies engaging in urban camping without a message or a clue.

The OWS phenomenon has created some interesting ironies like the Wall Street fund-raiser in-chief's, President Obama, implicit endorsement of this non-movement, or, after years of vilification, the Democratic Party trying to analogize OWS to the Tea Party movement. For my own part, and now I am joining the media's consideration of the OWS moment, I still think a robust market-based economy provides man with the best manner to maximize the material betterment of his life. I am aware of the arguments between those Catholics espousing "distributism" and those promoting some version of economic libertarianism (like the Austrian school). Quite frankly, I have not been able to choose my side in that debate beyond the strong distaste for the federal government, foreign aid, military interventionism, the United Nations, unions, security measures in airports and public places, and so forth. I find myself nodding my head in wholehearted agreement with Ron Paul every time he speaks. I am not sure that I am a libertarian (certainly not when it comes to questions of life, marriage, divorce, contraception, etc.), but when it comes to economic matters, the road to serfdom would appear paved with skulls of well-meaning liberal weenies whose only answer to any economic question is more and more governmental control and intervention.

Mirror of Justice, pray for those people, especially young people, who have been seduced by all of the various "-isms" of the day.