Tonight finds the situation in New York very tense, as protestors gather in an attempt to retain their rights to occupy the park. A corporation giving unlimited contributions towards political campaigns:
that is "free speech". The Supreme Court says you can't interfere. Camping in a public space to make an explicitly political message, however, somehow does not rise to the same level of protection.
I cannot imagine what Bloomberg or other officials are thinking here. I can think of no public action that would be less confrontational than camping in a park; compared to marches, flash mobs, sitdowns in corporate offices, picket lines, street art or anything else, one would think that all involved authorities would be quite happy to let "camping in the park" be the primary form of political protest. But, apparently, even this is too much. We said you could have free speech, sure: just don't make that speech sustained, or effective. We are seeing the same response in cities around the country, as they decide free speech counts for a bit less, on balance, than a nice clean lawn free from such things.
It's not going to work, though. If people are already dedicated enough to sleep in tents for weeks at a time for their cause, simply telling them they're not allowed anymore seems like it would result in precious few of them abandoning that cause. They're going to keep protesting, and if you actually manage to bar them from one way of doing it, they're going to move on to another.
At the moment the plan is to simply hold the park, period. Maybe the effort will be successful, or maybe not. Maybe a compromise will be reached that allows the protestors to continue to protest, or perhaps not. But the company, politicians and police figures involved already look like heels, no matter what happens next, and I frankly cannot fathom what outcome they might expect from all this that would not be substantially worse than merely camping in a public space.
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