Occupying shaky ground

Five weeks ago, as a group of sign-carrying 20-somethings walked toward the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, CNN.com was running a story about the Kim Kardashian wedding, Fox News was talking about how the president’s jobs plan would never work before it had even been presented and the New York Times was running a story about a political uprising on the other side of the globe.

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in broad daylight in the financial capital of the world, but in the first two weeks that followed, for all that America’s largest media outlets were showing us, it didn’t exist.

In an absurd twist, we needed Great Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the BBC and Qatar’s Al Jazeera to tell us what was happening in the most media-saturated city in the world.

But then, possibly out of a sense of journalistic embarrassment, the major media outlets began slowly trickling stories across televisions and monitors and news pages about the growing protest on Wall Street against the greed and corruption of government and the wealthy elite in general and perpetrators of broad-scale financial fraud in specific.

Strangely, the focus of the stories seemed to be more on mockery than information about why the protestors were flooding NYC’s financial district in the first place.

The first few stories to make major headlines were of screaming protestors being arrested, with no mention of what they were protesting. It’s as if the unspoken message was “these misguided young people were behaving badly, so they were arrested for it.” End of story.

Or was it? Even absent major media coverage about the specific outrage that lit the fuse on the protests, the protests kept growing anyway. Soon the Occupy name was finding new homes in Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and now Orlando.

The news stories and commentary began to get more focused on the message. Finally, the protest had a spotlight.

Then the vitriol came. In one segment, conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter alternately referred to the movement as both laughably disorganized and Nazi-esque.

From that side of the political aisle, the stance was clear: Protesting is only “American” if it agrees with our opinion. See Sean Hannity’s backing of the Tea Party protests, and subsequent derision of Occupy Wall Street, for reference.

But that lopsided spin carries with it an inherent danger: If conservative commentators can’t convincingly draw a line that defines the Occupy Wall Street protestors as left-wing enemies of America, they run the risk of alienating independents and conservatives who agree with some of the points the protestors have made.

Outrage against income and wealth disparity crosses well beyond the major political party divide. As the banners carried by the protestors plainly state: “We are the 99 percent.” That includes both liberals and conservatives. That’s a lot of potential protestors.

That corporations have attained all the power they need to effectively influence government already precludes the “power of the people” that first-amendment-wielding protestors draw from. The only strength they truly possess is in numbers, and they need those numbers to grow by reaching out to the most mainstream of Americans, and then broadening that appeal to increasingly politically diverse sides of the aisle.

The biggest danger to the Occupy movement is if the only people who show up continue to be largely left-leaning, ironically bearded, quasi-intellectual hipsters who encapsulate such a specific subculture that it’s easy to write off as a freak show rather than a genuine political uprising.

Protests live and die by whether the average American sees protestors as an “us” rather than a “them.”

Orlando represents one of the most diverse melting pots in the country, both ethnically and politically. What better litmus test for the viability of a political movement? This weekend, the Occupy Orlando protest in front of the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce will see if it can make populist outrage popular with the masses, rather than merely a party for the hippest of the echo boomer generation.