Occupy Brookfield

This is one of my pet peeves.   A few dozen social rejects who call themselves "protesters" assemble in a public park to mouth leftist slogans and it's news.   But thousands of regular people assemble to do regular people stuff like attend high school football games on Friday night or high school cross country meets on Saturday mornings -- also usually in public parks -- and it's not news.   Both are human activities.   Both involve citizens assembling.   Both, in different ways, involve people expressing what's important to them.   To some, a group I'll call without much creativity "the Losers," what's important to them is complaining about how other people have more than they do.   To others, a group I'll call, again without much creativity, "the Normals," what's important to them is what their kids are doing.   The former group is smaller and louder, the latter larger and generally reticent.   I know who I like better and respect more.   In fact, it's not a close call.

Anyway, today is the first day of the "Occupy Milwaukee" protest, and, as expected, it's being covered by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Protesters took to the streets of downtown Milwaukee Saturday as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to Wisconsin and elsewhere.

"The top one percent has been taking all the wealth and not just exploiting the population but the earth itself," said Andy Andre, 61, an unemployed mechanical designer.

Protesters descended on Zeidler Park before 11 a.m. carrying homemade signs reading "Tax the war profiteers" and "Jobs not War" and chanting "Occupy Milwaukee, not Iraq."

Saturday's protest was the first action in Milwaukee by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Here is a picture of the Occupy Milwaukee crowd, which doesn't appear to have been very large, and which also has some suspiciously pre-printed signs about "jobs" that obviously come from one of the Democratic Party-connected unions that are not-so-secretly backing the protests.  

By way of contrast, here's the beginning of the Greater Metro Conference JV Cross Country meet this morning:

Now, I'm no demographer, but I strongly suspect there were hundreds more people at the XC meet than there were at the "protest."   Were these people "occupying Brookfield"?   Well, maybe.   Maybe they were just Regular People getting on with their lives without complaining.