These days, it’s difficult to tell who hates Occupy Wall Street more: the New York Post or Mayor Bloomberg. In the past, the mayor has accused protesters of being bad for tourism and local businesses, while the Post has never made it a secret that its editors detest the movement.
This week, the Post published an editorial entitled “Time to throw the bums out.” But what are the editors really trying to tell us?
Time’s up: The Zuccotti Park vagabonds have had their say - and trashed lower Manhattan - for long enough.
They need to go.
Be it voluntarily - by packing their tents and heading off in an orderly fashion.
Or by having th NYPD step in - and evict them.
But go they must: Their lease on Zuccotti Park has expired.
And it’s their own fault.
Yes, that’s really how it’s written, typos and all. It’s as if the editors awoke from a fever dream featuring drum-circling hippies and banged out an angry tirade in the dead of night.
They go on to bemoan public urination, drum circles (naturally), lewdness, and “the criminals” and “their crimes,” whatever that means.
Such griping isn’t new from the Post, which has never been a publication that favors acts of civil disobedience unless the persons protesting have tea bags stapled to their skulls.
However, OWS is entering a dangerous period where the group does run the risk of wearing out its welcome in the city. The movement seems to have lost a bit of its flair as it struggles to carve out an identity for itself and wrestles with severe structural problems like how to control dangerous addicts in their midsts.
Bloomberg lashed out at activists Thursday after reports of self-policing in response to alleged sexual assaults and a possible rape.
“There have been reports, which are equally as disturbing, that when people in Zuccotti Park become aware of crimes, instead of calling the police, they form a circle around the perpetrator,” Bloomberg said.
Except, it makes sense that protesters are wary of the NYPD, the same police force that has arrested hundreds of demonstrators, beaten them with clubs, pepper sprayed them, and nearly stampeded them with horses.
This is also the same force that stands accused of encouraging addicts to “take it to Zuccotti,” so of course demonstrators are more interested in self-policing then turning to a force that has made it abundantly clear OWS is viewed as being comprised of domestic enemies who need to be contained, attacked, and incarcerated.
The sad reality is that OWS shouldn’t have to deal with self-policing matters. Theoretically, the NYPD should protect young women from being attacked by sexual predators simply because they’re citizens and inherently deserve those protections.
Yet there are many anti-OWS individuals who don’t see protesters as being deserving of those same protections, and clearly Bloomberg falls into this category. That’s why he’s outraged - outraged!! - that protesters are daring to protect themselves rather than place their trust in a police force that has repeatedly failed and abused them.
The mayor and NYPD’s attitudes right now seems to be: If you don’t want to get raped, little girl, go home.
This conundrum raises another interesting point, one that has to do with OWS’s identity. The movement was never meant to be a perpetual campout exhibit. Yes, the occupation is its most unique facet, and one that generated enormous public interest and media coverage. However, to remain in Zuccotti indefinitely and make this the movement’s end goal seems a waste of enormous potential.
The Occupy Iowa general assembly voted on a measure Monday that holds vast promise for the movement, and may carve the way for Occupy in terms of good long term goals that will bring the movement’s disruptive power right to the halls of political power.
Occupy Iowa voted this week to invite other chapters from across the country to help in an effort to shut down the Iowa campaign headquarters of presidential candidates until the state’s caucus day, Jan. 3. The group also plans to target President Obama’s campaign offices in the state. Organizers expect the effort to run from Dec. 27 through early January.
“You go inside or if they won’t let you in, you shut ‘em down,” Frank Cordaro, an Occupy Iowa protester who came up with the idea, told the Des Moines Register, which first reported the story. “Who knows? It could be a very big deal.”
…
Cordaro told CNN that he envisions “people coming to Iowa, occupying every presidential [candidate’s] office, shutting them down until they start talking real turkey about what’s going on in this country, where the 99% of the people who are not benefiting, at the expense of the 1% who are getting away with murder.”
It could indeed be a very big deal, particularly in terms of generating public support for the movement. OWS’s biggest public support boost came after the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, when the movement’s objectives were still very clear. Here was an uprising aimed at the upper one percent, and its participants chose to exercise their resistance by getting in the way and disrupting the flow of everyday business.
Now, that objective has been somewhat muddied as protesters find themselves focused on self-policing and fighting the presence of dangerous addicts in their camp.
By no means is that the movement’s fault. If anything, it’s a failure by Bloomberg and the NYPD, who have done everything in their power to sabotage the group, but the stark reality is if the public starts to view OWS as solely a camp harboring a fragmented cause and threatening transients, then the city’s citizens won’t raise hell when the mayor decides to raid the camp one late night sometime soon.
On the other hand, if OWS follows the Iowa model and brings the focus of the movement back to the halls of power, and back to Wall Street, they could win the PR battle.
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