sorry your mommy didn't love you enough. 
OAKLAND -- A majority of Occupy Oakland protesters sought Thursday to distance themselves from masked vandals who they said had undercut the movement by hijacking the tail end of a mostly peaceful protest, damaging downtown buildings and clashing with police.
"They are smearing our movement," Raleigh Latham, a filmmaker who has covered the Occupy protests, said to applause at a morning meeting of about 60 people at the movement's City Hall camp. "People who want to destroy our community are not welcome here."
They may not be welcomed by all of Occupy's committed sympathizers. But the hundreds of black-clad activists who coalesced downtown late Wednesday to take over a vacant building, barricade a street and then battle with police and vandalize stores are proving to be a complicated problem for the leaderless movement.
Many protesters, while saying they favor nonviolence, believe in provocative actions like marching on businesses and forcefully shutting them down - which happened at several bank branches during the comparatively peaceful daytime hours of Wednesday's general strike.
Still other protesters said Thursday that they saw value in chaos, or believed vandalism was an inevitable expression of rage by disenfranchised young people.
"These are drastic measures," said a masked 24-year-old from Oakland, "to make people listen."
OAKLAND -- A majority of Occupy Oakland protesters sought Thursday to distance themselves from masked vandals who they said had undercut the movement by hijacking the tail end of a mostly peaceful protest, damaging downtown buildings and clashing with police.
"They are smearing our movement," Raleigh Latham, a filmmaker who has covered the Occupy protests, said to applause at a morning meeting of about 60 people at the movement's City Hall camp. "People who want to destroy our community are not welcome here."
They may not be welcomed by all of Occupy's committed sympathizers. But the hundreds of black-clad activists who coalesced downtown late Wednesday to take over a vacant building, barricade a street and then battle with police and vandalize stores are proving to be a complicated problem for the leaderless movement.
Many protesters, while saying they favor nonviolence, believe in provocative actions like marching on businesses and forcefully shutting them down - which happened at several bank branches during the comparatively peaceful daytime hours of Wednesday's general strike.
Still other protesters said Thursday that they saw value in chaos, or believed vandalism was an inevitable expression of rage by disenfranchised young people.
"These are drastic measures," said a masked 24-year-old from Oakland, "to make people listen."
