Over the weekend the Occupy London protesters who continue to camp out in our city’s beautiful Victoria Park, held a movie night in one of the tents they’ve set up. They also have a library full of donated books and generators to operate the powerful lights they’ve set up. All they need is Jefferson Airplane and they could call it Woodstock. Late last week the city’s Parks and Recreation department sent a three page letter to the occupiers. In it, the department heads detailed the fall maintenance that needs to be done in the park and why setting up a tent city is damaging the grounds that belong to everyone. It asked them to move out. Also on the weekend one of the tent-dwellers smugly told a London Free Press reporter that they were going to stay put and nothing would be done about it because Mayor Joe Fontana doesn’t want to be the first to forcibly remove occupiers in this movement. Someone also referred to Fontana as a flip-flopper because he had said at first that they could stay in the park. Now he has changed his mind. I call that adjusting one’s position after acquiring more information.
I hope he does toss them out. I don’t want to see any violence or anyone getting hurt but the law is the law and we are all subject to a reaction if we break it. Imagine if I pitched a tent at Victoria Park in the summer just because I felt like it. I’d be packed up and shipped out so fast. And to the fools who say camping in the park is the same as festival vendors putting up their displays overnight, that’s just damn ridiculous. Festivals have permits and their people aren’t living in the tents. It’s legitimate business.
I may agree that I am part of the 99%, meaning that I’m not ridiculously wealthy nor am I exempt from paying my share into this country’s economy via taxes, but there isn’t a person in that park who speaks for me. I’m sick of their arrogance in saying that they do. The time has long since passed when they should have made their message clear and gotten the rest of us onside. Instead they are proving themselves to be anything but representatives for me and people like me who go to work every day and can’t afford – literally – to spend days and nights squatting on public land. It’s time for them to go.
I agree. Enough already.