The only similarity Tea Party rallies and the Occupy Wall Street protests share is that both involve humans gathered in public spaces. Other than that they have about as much in common as a Rolling Stones concert does with a public stoning.
The UK Daily Mail featured a story on the unsavory conditions at the OWS protestors’ home base in Manhattan, Zuccotti Park, including photos of one flannel-clad agitator squatting and defecating against a police car. Hmm, I think the last time that happened at a Tea Party rally was… never.
Having destroyed the park over the past three weeks by filling it with patchouli ashes and feces, the protestors traipsed north on Saturday to turn another great New York gathering space, Washington Square Park, into a public urinal.
The glaring differences between OWS and the Tea Party rallies are obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes (and nostrils).
The Tea Party movement, which began around the start of Barack Obama’s presidency and built momentum during the year-long national healthcare debate, was a grassroots uprising. Across the country, people who had never been active in politics networked and gathered with concerned, like-minded citizens to demand a curb on the intrusion of federal government into our lives.
In contrast, OWS, which is a fraction of the size of the Tea Party, was instigated by an anti-consumerist Canadian magazine called Adbusters, and has seen its numbers swell via conspicuous throngs of bused-in union members, bored trust fund brats cruising for easy sex, disheveled homeless people looking for free food, and savvy criminals [8] on the lam who understand that a crowd of ragtag bums is the perfect hiding spot for them.
Despite their heated rhetoric, Tea Party rallies have been amazingly peaceful, with not a single arrest or incidence of violence—except for those committed by union members against the ralliers—across hundreds of cities and thousands of events attended by millions of people over the past two-and-a-half years.
In contrast, OWS has disrupted its host cities, with over 700 arrests in just one day in one city (New York) and tens of millions of dollars in policing costs only a few weeks into the movement. Commuters and municipal officials have complained about the invaders’ lack of respect for residents just trying to go about their business.
Tea Party rallies have been antiseptically clean, to such a degree that public works employees have gushed about how attendees leave the protest areas cleaner than when they arrived.
In contrast, OWS occupation has been sickeningly unsanitary, with widespread public urination and defecation, hordes of unwashed louts mating in filthy sleeping bags, mounting piles of rotting trash, and an omnipresent odor of raw sewage.
The Tea Party has been well-organized and influential, having achieved earth-shattering electoral results in special and off-year gubernatorial and senatorial elections, and a historic landslide in the Congressional midterms.
In contrast, OWS has been ineffectual and impotent, with no one—including the protestors—having any idea what they want, let alone how they hope to achieve it by playing hacky sack and painting their bodies like tribesmen.
Most Tea Partiers took time out of their busy days to attend the rallies, which were almost always held in the evenings, after work, or on weekends.
In contrast, most OWS protestors appear to have no jobs, homes, or responsibilities to attend to, and seem to be looking to the rallies to provide them with shelter, food, and a purpose in life.
And those are just the superficial differences!
On a deeper level, the Tea Partiers want government to leave them alone and allow them to be productive citizens and decide how to spend their money. In contrast, OWS protestors wish to tear down the capitalist system while forcing society to give them free college, universal healthcare, and guaranteed home ownership.
The Tea Party’s heroes have included our nation’s Founding Fathers, and 20th-century political and philosophical leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand. In contrast, OWS has thrown its support to the likes of cop-killer Troy Davis and al-Qaeda conspirator Tarek Mehanna [9].
Tea Partiers have been reading and debating the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. OWS leaders have been teaching protestors how to pick open handcuffs with hairpins.
Tea Party organizers have been handing out miniature flags; OWS leaders have been distributing condoms.
As anyone who’s been watching knows, the Tea Party increased its influence the larger it grew and the more it pervaded our culture. Given the public revulsion over the Wall Street protests, the longer these embarrassing displays continue the bigger the anti-Democratic tsunami will be in 2012.
