just my two cents --
"protesters" do NOT give us or anyone - any better system or any better anything...so we'd better be careful when celebrating "protesters" without first checking what those protesters ushered in...
history shows that a LARGE percentage of protests gain us nothing and some result in substantially worse outcome than the protesters had to begin with!!!
All some protests do is help tear down the old system - then the door is open for the next system to come along....the "protesters" are often just rolling the dice hoping for something better but guaranteeing NOTHING.
I can easily think of lots of "protesters" who didn't like what they had so they staged PROTESTS...and lo & behold..
they ended up with something worse...
-"Red October" (no, not the movie) - Russians didn't like the Czars...
so they protested and ended up with Lenin, Stalin, 70 years of Communism, and more than 25,000,000 people murdered over the next few decades..and soemthing that had they ever envisioned they'd have never overthrown the Czars.
-the US had lots of protests in the 1960's and there's a lot of people who think all of it was good and reminisce about hippies, Woodstock, and Kent State...but ....what did we end up with...
laxed morals, God-less society and schools, an entire generation of self-absorbed nacissistic, lazy people expecting the government to supply their needs, incredible socialist spending that has now bankrupted the nation, we pulled out of Vietnam & chose to lose the war yielding the entire Asian peninsula to the Commies, and a million people were slaughtered, and now there are plenty who would love to go back to the peace & social systems of the pre-protest 50's & 60's - in other words we admire the protests but they resulted in a lot of bad stuff
-over the years various "protests" in China have simply led to more killings, political imprisonments & disappearances, and government crackdowns..not much has ever been gained
-current Arab protests have not yet resulted in any NEW stable, free, democratic governments - and as it apparent in Egypt - perhaps an even more oppressive Sharia law government could result
-then we come to the "Occupy" protesters who are all into themselves thinking they are the next great movement in the world..but all they're doing is tilting American more towards the SOCIALISM of those failing nations in Europe who have already tried all the very same things the "Occupy" people claim they want!
It is doomed to make American a WORSE nation for the vast majority of people.
To honor the protesters but NOT look at what their protests result in - is like honoring an eraser but ignoring what then gets written on the empty chalkboard
