It has been one year since the Occupy Wall Street movement began. This should be a time of celebration, this should be a time of reflection of all the accomplishments they made in the past year. This has become a time of nothing. There were some rallies in major cities. Locally there was a march that got about 30 seconds on local news.

It's remarkable about what happened with the movement. It went from a groundswell of support, of images that haunted the mind, of promises of a peaceful and powerful revolution, and the best we can see after one year is that there is a national dialog about wealth and class in our politics. The question is, wouldn't this dialog have happened anyway since Mitt Romney is a candidate for President? When you have a man running for President who thinks a $10,000 bet is a friendly wager, when he thinks a small speaking fee for a year is over $400,000 and when as an 'unemployed person', as he joked about early in the campaign, makes over $50,000 a day, income disparity is going to be a strong topic in the election.

As someone who covered the movement locally and followed it nationally, the Occupy Movement was doomed to failure because the people participating had no idea what it was like to protest. By saying protest I mean the whole encompassing ramifications of protesting and bucking the establishment. My generations, the Gen Xers, have a nostalgia view of protests. We see news reels of flower power, of rallies with the mass of humanity and that is our view of revolution. We are like the baby boomers who heard stories from people coming back from World War II who talked of heroes and just causes for war. They were fed the hero stories about war and never got a complete picture. War isn't a 40s Hollywood movie. Even if the war is seen as necessary, people do things in war that are horrible, that are disturbing and are things you can't explain to people who haven't been there. The baby boomers now who send people into war sometimes talk to us about war in terms of patriotism, of flag waving and liberty and freedom without weighing the human cost to us and those on the other side. We treat war as a sick game.

Protesting isn't anything close to war, but my generations and the ones after mine who were so taken up with the Occupy Movement had no idea what protesting would be like. For months, with cameras rolling, Occupy Wall Street was shown as being about the park. All across the country, and I saw it first hand here, the movement talked a good game about a vast amount of issues but their message was boiled down to taking over a place. It was about squatting in a park. Those that were 'running the show' couldn't agree on what message they wanted to get out to the public. Too many factions tried to bring up legitimate and frankly silly issues. As much as they wanted to be a legitimate movement there was no organization and they didn't want to have organization.

Occupy became a movement without a leader, without a structure and without an idea. In the eye of the public, the Occupy Movement is defined by taking over a park.

Yes, people got hurt, people got pepper-sprayed, people were pushed around by the police. People were taken to jail. Locally, I noticed that first big rally was filled with estimates of two thousand people. Energy was high and people were willing to listen and try to make a change in the world. By the next weekend, actually by the Monday after the big rally, the interest started to leave the crowd as people realized they needed to do work to make things happen. I think the assumption many had was fed by images they saw in New York and other large cities. The assumption was massive amounts of people would rally to the cause just by sheer frustration and would sustain the movement. The problem was at it's core the movement had no clear voice. Occupy became a dumping ground for all the ills people were having with the economy and their lives.

Locally the numbers slowly dwindled down, in fighting became the norm and since there was no leadership structure, there was no way to get people focused for a cause. The last big gasp for the Occupy movement was in December. Locally, Jesse Jackson arrived to lend support, and a group that had been about 20 people for a good portion of October and November swelled to 300+ to see Jackson. It was a far cry from the over 2000 in September but it was something. Two weeks later the die hard numbers were down to 5 and by the end of the year there was no presence of the Occupy Movement around here.

The biggest error I think occurred with the movement is they believed their own hype. They saw a mountain they wanted to charge and assumed millions of people would be there to support the idea. The movement figured the vague idea of injustice and slogans would be the fuel to generate momentum to carry them over the hill. It wasn't and with no organization, all the establishment had to do was wait them out. Yes, we are talking about economic disparity but that is just talk. When the public weights the accomplishments of the Occupy Movement and that of the Tea Party, the Tea Party is clearly a winner. While it is a common liberal mantra to talk about corporate money in the Tea Party movement, they were a force in the election of 2010 and this year. The Arab Spring, very similar to the Occupy movement, has toppled governments in the Middle East. The Occupy Movement doesn't even have a park. It may be true that in years to come the movement could grow into something, but to be honest it's wishful thinking to hold on to that scenario. The movement was a good idea that had a short and spectacular run.