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Evicted Occupiers on NPR
Nov. 15th, 2011 09:07 amI just read an NPR piece that popped up in my facebook feed, about the Occupy Wall Street people getting evicted from the park in NYC. As NPR is somewhere between a non-biased and a very liberal source, depending on the particular writer and the given reader's perspective, I figured it was a safe bet to try to read their description in an effort to relate and understand where the protesters are coming from. From the statuses and videos I was seeing from other facebookers and on tumblr, I was anticipating some serious injustice that would make me angry.
This is the piece, fyi - http://www.npr.org/2011/11/15/142333918/wall-street-protesters-ousted-from-zuccotti-park?sc=fb&cc=fp
I'm sorry, though, I just...don't get it. The city's let them be there for 2 months and is just asking them to get out of there long enough to clean the park and then they can come right back. The city has been ignoring groups of local residents and business owners who want the protesters out, even though those residents and owners have just as much right to a say as the protesters do. I understand people are angry about police brutality in the face of a peaceful protest, but what else are police supposed to do when they won't move their damn bodies out of the fucking way until "brute force" is used??
I've never been involved in a protest, let alone an ongoing one, so maybe I'm missing something about how the movement is weakened by taking a break for them to clean the park, but from where I'm sitting it seems pretty plausible that the place is getting gross after two months with no sanitation workers and a serious crowd gathered. Most of the protesters come and go individually ANYWAY. Obviously if the city were saying "this protest is over!!" and people refused to leave, that could be a very powerful thing, send a message, whatever. But standing around getting pepper sprayed and arrested and posting about it, rather than doing something else for one day in cooperation with a city that has totally cooperated with you, and then swooping back in for another couple of months seems...pointless, to me. Theatrical.
Blah.
Note - I may still be feeling irked against protesters in general, in the immediate wake of seeing Penn State people burn things, overturn cars and scream in the streets on camera because someone was fired for protecting a child rapist and it interfered with their football. That is not really similar to what the OWS people are doing on any level, it was just dumbfounding in and of itself.
This is the piece, fyi - http://www.npr.org/2011/11/15/142333918/wall-street-protesters-ousted-from-zuccotti-park?sc=fb&cc=fp
I'm sorry, though, I just...don't get it. The city's let them be there for 2 months and is just asking them to get out of there long enough to clean the park and then they can come right back. The city has been ignoring groups of local residents and business owners who want the protesters out, even though those residents and owners have just as much right to a say as the protesters do. I understand people are angry about police brutality in the face of a peaceful protest, but what else are police supposed to do when they won't move their damn bodies out of the fucking way until "brute force" is used??
I've never been involved in a protest, let alone an ongoing one, so maybe I'm missing something about how the movement is weakened by taking a break for them to clean the park, but from where I'm sitting it seems pretty plausible that the place is getting gross after two months with no sanitation workers and a serious crowd gathered. Most of the protesters come and go individually ANYWAY. Obviously if the city were saying "this protest is over!!" and people refused to leave, that could be a very powerful thing, send a message, whatever. But standing around getting pepper sprayed and arrested and posting about it, rather than doing something else for one day in cooperation with a city that has totally cooperated with you, and then swooping back in for another couple of months seems...pointless, to me. Theatrical.
Blah.
Note - I may still be feeling irked against protesters in general, in the immediate wake of seeing Penn State people burn things, overturn cars and scream in the streets on camera because someone was fired for protecting a child rapist and it interfered with their football. That is not really similar to what the OWS people are doing on any level, it was just dumbfounding in and of itself.
