Damn Hippies

I was enjoying some sushi last night realized the table next to us was a father/daughter duo getting psyched to protest today. Gotta vent about Occupy.

All these reports of elevated crime, drug dealers, general danger, excessive hostility against law enforcement, I’ve taken four or five tours of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district and I can assure you that they are no exaggeration, that the drug usage has shifted from my smelling ubiquitous pot smoke to seeing in-the-open drug deals and meth addicts tweaking out. It’s not just a microcosm of society down there, and presumably Occupy tent cities elsewhere, banging bongos and blocking traffic (which I really hate by the way, New York City traffic is bad enough), they’re all stuffed together so tightly that the latest concern, displacing reports of their need to set up a rape-free zone, is an outbreak of what they’re calling Zuccotti Lung — feared to become a pervasive resistant form of tuberculosis. Might not be hype.

When I’ve returned from a siteseeing trip (I’m done with that by the way, got a wife not to give TB to) the first thing I do is take a shower even if I didn’t touch anything, afraid that poopy water evaporated and sprinkled upon me, and I’m the type that doesn’t even bother washing my hands after a subway ride (unless it’s from downtown). Absolute putrid, repugnant filth and people are turning it into an indefinite way of life. The closest thing to what you might call the leadership of this movement has lost, or chosen not to exercise, control of the movement and everyone, and as a result, except those amused by this, those selling tents and slinging drugs or dealing silly masks of someone who bombed a government building, or getting some sort of therapeutic benefit from the venting of wildly inconsistent grievances, everyone is paying the price.

I was going to beam up some video I shot in Zuccotti Park, ground zero of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to characterize what this whole thing has been heading toward but these clips do it justice. Roll tape.

Look. My position is that this movement is not only a major public nuisance and a general threat to this country, and I don’t just mean their Molotov cocktails and defecating on police cars and overdosing with increasing frequency and making weapons and using them, but they are not only not going to hurt the banks at all or whatever it is they most commonly want to do (like "kill the Fed" and get rid of all debt and money, brilliant stuff), they are instead hurting small businesses (collateral damage for the bigger picture of their war is their canned response to that) and opening the window wider by offering their stagnant snafu as an asset to the right wing in getting a republican in the Whitehouse (namely as what can be called rampant rioting can be pinned to Obama’s watch) which, no matter how much they hate the system and The Man, is probably not what they’d want if they thought things out.

Yes I know it probably won’t help the situation, I know that my best bet is winter hopefully freezing them out and the economy to recover just in time for warm weather to return without the protesters, but frankly I want to see cities, their mayors and cops get a lot more decisive, aggressive, in the actions they take against uncooperative, militant and statutorily unwelcome protesters. Kind of curious if enough tear gas and high velocity bean bags can help partially snuff this toxicity out because the more time that passes the worse it may become and the harder it will become to eradicate once we all agree that it’s time for them to go home.

I know that last line won’t go over well but hey man, I’m exercising my First Amendment rights, don’t break my balls for wishing more pepper paintballs on this globally metastasizing cancer. Movement? Movement my ass, so to speak. Damn hippies.

Oh right, need to tie this into Mobility: If you want to get in on some good police scanner action, there’s going to be a showdown tonight in Portland Oregon (Multnomah County). Tune in tonight (now it’s kind of slow, they’re asleep) on a computer here, Android app here, WP here, BB here, iOS here.

Doug Simmons