As most of the Occupy Wall Street protestors' objection to materialism and capitalist greed is their inability to participate. There is nothing admirable here, just a bunch of petty, immature losers acting on an unwarranted sense of entitlement, and almost certainly from the same demographic that was so excited three years ago about the Hope and Change candidate, sponsored by the same financial community they protest today. What is more, this whole notion of "Occupying" Wall Street serves only to interfere with other members of the 99%, as the majority of people who work on Wall Street are, as well as the ones most directly impacted by the stock market's failures. Protesting a bad economy at Wall Street is like protesting a military defeat at an army base - you might be upset about the ripples you're feeling, but you're acting on it by harassing those whose very livelihoods are concerned with those events, and who have probably lost friends and colleagues as well.

As far as the violence and so forth goes, the narrative crafted after the fact will reflect what those writing it want it to. Someone mentioned historical context in this thread, but they are just stringing together a bunch of unrelated protests, and not looking at the individual contexts of those. For example, Martin Luther King Jr's march on Selma was against the advice of all sorts of civil rights leaders, including the black community of Selma, because for all intents and purposes, they had already won. Instead, his glory-seeking march sparked excessive retaliation from Bull Connors and revitalized his lame-duck career, rallying the support of opponents of the civil rights movement, not to mention drawing down the violence on children and other human shields King incited to march. His own obnoxious behavior does not justify what was done in response, but after the fact, the narrative reflects this pointless & unnecessary conflict which only served to inflate the reputations of the irresponsible leaders on both sides, is reflected as a grand triumph after the fact.

Likewise at Kent State, it was hardly like the National Guard marched in and started randomly gunning down hippies. It was in the aftermath of attacks on guardsmen, of female demonstrators feeding them drugged snacks and the shooting itself was precipitated by someone throwing stuff at them. Yet history remembers them as the wrongdoers.

When race riots were sweeping the country, Chicago was largely spared (as were most of the cities in the South), because of Mayor Daley's expressed willingness to allow the police to shoot back in the eventuality.

Lets all try to remember that this country was founded by men like John Adams who defended the soldiers who shot at the mobs in the Boston Massacre, not by the "demonstrators".