As the winter months approach, OWS protesters are preparing to face the cold weather and part of that planning involves the use of military grade tents “as big as tiny cottages.” The presence of these large structures will offer yet another challenge to Mayor Bloomberg’s authority.
Both the mayor and the NYPD have offered a sort of non-official truce to the protesters when they turned a blind eye to physical structures appearing in Liberty Plaza. In the early days of OWS, police seized any and all structures - not just tents, but projector screens, and anything that constituted being propped up by a foreign inanimate object.
To get around this rule at the genesis of OWS, protesters physically held up the projector screen during presentations, and tied paint tarps to the park’s stairway handrail before shimmying underneath to create some kind of protection from the elements.
As the first few tents began to spring up in the park, it was perhaps more convenient for the NYPD to turn a blind eye to the emerging event. Why risk a full-blown insurrection over a couple tents? But this new (and extremely necessary) addition of military tents will be impossible for Bloomberg to ignore.
Protester Jeffrey Brewer told the Washington Post three tents have already been erected in Zuccotti and he’s helping to install four more. Twenty more tents are being ordered at a cost of about $25,000 total. Brewer says the tents were paid for through donations.
Photo of one of the military tents (Seth Wenig/AP):
One of the first tents to be raised was for the volunteer medics and their patients, while another was designated a “safe space” for women in response to the recent reports of sexual attacks at the camp.
The cold has become OWS’s most immediate, and arguably greatest, threat. It was the change in seasons that inspired blogger Lee Papa AKA “Rude Pundit” to create Blanket The Earth, a project to get blankets and other winter necessities to protesters.
Papa proposed his readers check out OWS’s list of things they’ll need in order to survive into the spring, purchase some of the items, and ship them off to the camps.
“Bring stuff to keep ‘em warm through the cold nights since they are doing the hard, hard work of creating the foundation for genuinely forcing chance in the political dialogue and the economic stratification of the United States (and around the world),” wrote Papa.
Right now, the protesters are at the mercy of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns Zuccotti, and on whose board Bloomberg’s live-in girlfriend currently sits.
Bloomberg has consistently deflected questions about the legality of the tent structures, saying, “So far they’re not complying with Brookfield’s regulations, but Brookfield has not asked us to help them enforce those regulations.”
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