This weekend, an Occupy Wall Street protester was captured in a photograph defecating on a police car in New York City.
For those who want to immediately categorize the Occupy Wall Street movement as disrespectful or uncivil, please wait before you make such sweeping assumptions.
Some have called the "Occupy" movement a left-wing response to the tea party.
The current level of civic engagement on both sides of the ideological spectrum is encouraging, but the actions of a few outliers have been used to categorize the attitudes, thoughts and feelings of each movement.
For some, the tea party is just a bunch of racist, old, white Christian Southerners who want to shoot guns and read the Bible all day.
Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson recently criticized members of the tea party movement as being racist against President Barack Obama.
Many have used pictures of signs comparing Obama to a primate or the misspelling of the N-word to illustrate the racist tendencies of members of the movement.
But can we really come to acceptable conclusions about a movement based on a minority of its members?
Every movement, whether it's on the left or on the right, has its outliers.
Earlier this year, a video surfaced of a protest in California of the infamous Koch brothers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists who donate to conservative interest groups. A couple of the protesters were caught on tape calling for the hanging of (African-American) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his involvement with Koch-sponsored organizations.
Were these individuals representative of everyone at this protest? Absolutely not. It would be intellectually dishonest to make that claim.
Of course, there will probably be many who criticize this editorial by saying that one side is really more racist or crazy than the other.
But in the end, if we truly look at the majority of people in these political movements, we will find that they are normal.
They are people in your classes, your neighbors and possibly even your close friends. Chances are they don't have malicious or violent motives.
It seems that both groups can simply be categorized as frustrated. Their frustration may be directed at the government or corporations or both. They also might have different goals or outcomes they would like to see from policy-makers.
However, speculating that the motives of the members of these movements are based in racism, Marxism or any other "-ism" out there is foolish and childish.
We can all debate possible solutions, but let's be grown-ups about it.
You can certainly disagree because debate is healthy; just be decent.
