Punk Is...?

We all now the fashion, the look: lots of safety pins, mohawks, Doc Martens, plaid, fishnets, hand drawn band logos on any and every space and, of course, tattoos and piercings. But, besides the shallow, materialistic nature of it, what is punk? What do punks do? What makes doing something punk? What is the whole purpose behind the movement we all know and love as punk? I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I try to capture the energy, the feeling and-yes- the look that is punk in some form of art, whether it's the graphic novel I'm working on or a short story idea I have. But I honestly don't know what to say. 'People with lots of piercings sit around unbathed and look pissed off' does not make a very interesting story. Maybe it's the youthful anarchic energy of just breaking into places and tearing stuff apart, the spray painting art on walls, smashing windows with baseball bats and (anti)propaganding the public space. But is that really punk? People have been doing that in some form or other since at least 1850s Russia- whether it was the social democrats under Czar Alexander II, the labor movement of the Haymarket Square affair, 1920s dada and surrealist in Europe and the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. So, do we then say that 'punk' is really just the latest incarnation of something that's been done, over and over, before? If so, then we can kiss the whole originality of punk good-bye. And I thought being original and doing something new and different and without fear or borders was the whole point behind punk in the first place. I guess not. What do you think?