That's right. We're trolls. Trolling on the street, pissing people off. But we're trolls for a cause, trolling for the right reason, and trolling our way to victory! We're good trolls!
So when people complain that we're raking up gazillions of dollars of bills to the taxpayers so the cops can don riot gear and crack our skulls, or whine about how our blocking streets and disrupting traffic makes people mad, or that we're costing businesses money, or that we're burning flags or hanging them upside down, or otherwise alienating people, I say that's part of the desired effect!
We WANT to piss people off.
We want people angry.
Because we tried playing nice. Writing letters and sending petitions to our Congressmen, participating in election campaigns, getting out the vote, trying to elect more and better Democrats. And we learned one thing. When we play by the rules, the sociopathic fucks with all the power ignore us, and the people in general tune us out and don't hear us.
The only way to get heard in a system designed to drown out our voices is to troll. You have to go and piss people off. Make people mad. Fuck with them.
It works. It worked for Martin Luther King. Ever notice how he was only lionized after he was killed? When he was alive, a lot of people HATED him. He was very disruptive. He was trolling. He had people blocking streets, he provoked police into committing acts of violence, his people sat in at whites-only restaurants, getting screamed at, hit, spat on. He was trolling. I need to find or make an MLK Jr. Trollface.
People worried about alienating potential supporters are fallaciously conflating two things: The popularity of the group doing the trolling (in this case, OWS), and the causes they're supporting. You ask the same people who are disapproving of OWS what they think of Wall Street and economic inequality, and most of them will tell you they're sick of being fucked! Except the teabaggers, but that's alright - they can't be reached anyways. We're looking at sticking our ideas in everyone else's minds, and pissing them off is surprisingly effective at getting ideas out there.
The Republicans know this. That's why they've been disrupting the legislative process non-stop - they don't care if Congress is unpopular. They keep deliberately pissing people off. And they keep winning elections.
So get out there, go piss some people off! Block those streets, shut down ports, maximize the disruption. Burn flags, blaspheme in front of the fundies, be as offensive as possible! Do things that make people mad enough to get you arrested, or even get you assaulted!
BE AN ASSHOLE!!! That's how you get heard when no other way works.
In the words of Malcolm Reynolds, I aim to misbehave!