Hey Occupy Wall Street... in case you're wondering what it will take to get the media to give you and your protests the coverage you fucking deserve, the short answer is: Violence. That's what the media, through their relative silence, is demanding. Either present at least the credible threat of physical violence, or they're turning their cameras elsewhere.

By comparison, the teabaggers threaten violence. That's what gets them so much coverage. You think their open carry bullshit isn't calculated to intimidate? You think their angry disruption of congressional town hall meetings wasn't all part of a carefully coordinated media/political strategy? You think the Gabrielle Giffords shooting didn't make them even more of force to be reckoned with? The entire vocabulary of the Tea Party movement is based on little but rhetorical violence. Hell, even the name of the organization pays tribute to an act of political violence. That's not an accident.

Yet when was the last time an organized protest from the American left made the powers that be nervous enough to garner wide and sustained media attention? WTO, that's when. "The Battle in Seattle." I've heard local labor organizers lament about how those "fucking anarchists" highjacked the demonstrations, causing the message to be lost in senseless acts of property damage and the incompetent and irresponsibly violent police response that followed. But the irony is, as impressively massive, well-planned, and peaceful as the WTO protests initially were, they would have garnered relatively little media attention, and would have long since been forgotten, had it not been for the violence, both private and official, that eventually ensued.

The point is, allowing yourselves to be calmly herded onto bridges and arrested, or penned defenselessly behind mesh fences where you can be casually maced... that's simply not a good enough story. Nobody fears a peaceful protest. And while demonstrators may think they're following in the successful civil disobedience footsteps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., history tells us that it was state sponsored/sanctioned violence against the people, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre or the many brutal murders and attacks in the apartheid South, that ultimately sparked the public sympathy that led to reform. So unless you can at least provoke the police toward bloodshed—unless some of you actually martyr your bodies (or like Gandhi and MLK, your lives) to the cause—peaceful non-compliance will get you nowhere.

At least, with the media. Remember, the press doesn't view you as victims. You're disrupting the daily routines of everyday life. That makes you a nuisance. Furthermore, the corporate media journalists you're asking for coverage owe their very livelihood to some of the very same corporations and financiers you're protesting, so, um, good luck with that. But give them a little violence, well, that's a visual the media can't resist.

To be clear, I'm not advocating violence. I don't actually want to see anybody get hurt. But if your goal is to get the nation to pay attention to you and your message, well, you know, violence works. Because if experience has taught us anything, it's that the threat of violence is the only thing our media and political establishment appear to take seriously.