Occupy Oakland and the Original Tea Party

Pelting police officers with bottles, metal piping, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices, and burning flares, along with setting fire to American flags and committing vandalism, are not recommended ways of staying out of jail, nor are they actions well tailored to gain general public sympathy.  But such were the actions of the Occupy protestors in Oakland, California this past weekend [1], leaving city workers to clean up the mess this morning. [2]

No matter how much one may find common ground with the aims of the Occupy Movement, surely no rational person expects the police to passively endure a rain of rocks and explosives.  Moreover, it would be unrealistic to hope that the mayor of Oakland would applaud the destruction of property in city hall.

Yet the Boston Tea Party could not have been welcomed by the East India Company, and the colonists who participated had no reasonable expectation of anything other than the retaliation by Parliament that followed.  And when the Massachusetts militiamen resisted with deadly force the march of the British regulars on Concord, they certainly understood that they had engaged in the ultimate manifestation of disrespect for the existing order.  Neither of these actions, it can be said with confidence, were lawful.

The ambiguity that may be felt by many Americans toward an Occupy Movement turned violent is born of the recognition that the United States itself came into existence through violent revolt.  There is little likelihood that the American Revolution was the only such revolt that had been, or ever will be, justified in its aims.

Will the Occupy Movement be viewed by future generations as a noble cause, worthy of breaching the legal edifice of the system it protests?  The answer depends in large part on the outcome.  To the victors go not only the spoils, but the writing of history.

The revolt of that first generation came about because the British Parliament imposed taxes on the colonists who had no representation in that body.  The revolt emerging in our time is the result of a Congress that all the world knows to be purchased by moneyed interests. 

The British Parliament acquired too much of a taste for passing legislation unimpeded by democratic restraints to forestall the revolution that gave birth to our Republic.  To date, our Congress has shown little inclination to abolish the influence of money in politics, hoping, perhaps, that most of us will remain law-abiding and put up with it.