Chad,

It seems that Frank Miller offers as much of a point and purpose as the Occupy Wall Street movement does!

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and a lot of other major protests have the unfortunate tendency to draw out the crazies. We've all seen the guys with AK-47s, the guys with racist signs and the loons that jumped on board what was supposed to be a tax/economy protest with the Tea Party.  

As the OWS aligns itself with the left in accusing Wall Street and "Big Business", they get a lot of the "Professional, Organized Anarchists" who seem to just be about being against "Grown-ups", before they go back to their parents' reasonably well off upper middle-class existence.

These groups bring with them a small subculture of drug use, "free sex" and also drugdealers and serial rapists with a plentiful supply of roofies. Just like any outdoor rock festival.  They also often have a "stick it to the man" attitude towards small business owners and will vandalize and loot at the drop of a hat.

These types (whom we see so often over here in Europe during protests) are not really about the issues. They don't care about issues. They're there for the "experience".

Now, chances are that in most places these professional protesters are going to be a very small minority, but they'll jockey for influence and go for confrontation. Just like loons in the Tea Party.

Do I think the core idea of the movement is correct in protesting Wall Street? Sure. And those segments that are made up of reasonable people with a genuine issue, like Unions and people complaining about the Health Care system, need and deserve to be heard.

But the longer it keeps going, the greater the chance that the professional anarchists will start something that delegitimizes the protest.

That being said, I think certain parts of the media focus on bad behavior in the OWS that they would gloss over with the Tea Party. Although the challenges posed by the irrational fringe of either movement are very different.

And I think Frank Miller has a lot of nerve suggesting these kids should enlist. He never served himself. I served (clerical work, peacetime. Not a combat veteran) but I would never suggest to someone that there was something wrong with them if they didn't.

Like so many Chickenhawks, he tells people to make huge sacrifices that he never did himself. That really rankles me. Because by suggesting they should enlist he wraps himself in the mantle of a soldier. Coming from a soldier I would accept that as honest advice based on personal experience. Coming from a Chickenhawk it offends me.

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Since the Sixties and Seventies, when the war in Vietnam was raging, and young people in this Nation -- many of whom were being shipped off to die in that war, with no choice whatsoever -- rose up to make themselves heard, there have been many protest groups, and few, to my eyes, have had the same core, the same energy, the same drive as the Vietnam protesters. So many, in fact, have read as little more than wannabes, trying to bottle a piece of the same energy that so fired previous generations, yet in the end coming across as somewhat angrier variants on flash mobs.

Which is their right, of course, under the First Amendment, but it does rub the wrong way some of us with longer memories. Which would include Frank.

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Did you say what you meant to say, cuz, frankly, that makes no sense at all!

I think the one response to the older generation that whine constantly and make sweeping generalizations about the "entitlement generation" that I've come up with is "You didn't have to work that hard. You had it easy.". Say it in the most snarky, dismissive way possible. Smile while doing so. Make sure that every single moment of their life they had to work for what they have is tossed aside by a simple "you had it easy".

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Compared with the Vietnam generation later generations have had it easier. Unlike my father and other people of that era later generations have not  had to worry about getting invitations to a arm pits like Vietnam. They had no way of turning down the invitation. I'm not saying later generations have not worked hard for what they have or haven't had problems. I'm just saying we have had less to worry about.

"They had no way of turning down the invitation"

Dick Cheney and a whole slew of Right-Wing Chickenhawks found lots of ways to turn down that invitation. Despite being of an appropriate age and being for the Vietnam war at the time.

Generalizing it as "generations" having it easier sidesteps one important point: There are a lot of Chickenhawks out there with no military service besides Miller who urge young kids to enlist. And a lot of pundits talking about how "easy" kids have it today come from relatively well-to-do backgrounds and did in fact "have it easy".

It should be a requirement for anyone playing the "military service would make a man out of you" card that they as an individual actually served. It should be a requirement that anyone going "kids today have it easy" should, as an individual, have had it hard growing up.

Sure, things generally improve generation by generation, but a lot of kids still have a hard life. And what the OWS are protesting are irresponsible policies and decisions that may very well regress that development so even more kids and families endure great hardships. I.e. a process whereby kids today have a genuinely harder time of it than the previous generation.

Sure, the OWS may make up its numbers from artsy upper middle-class kids who see this as an opportunity to smoke dope and have casual sex in the middle of the street. Fine. But there is a genuine point to this. Wall Street (being symbolic of the entire US financial establishment) managed to screw the entire world economy and make money for themselves in the process, with very little accountability.

This is not a case of them going after the wrong guys. Wall Street is who the Tea Party should have gone after in the first place.