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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Occupying and occupied

From a friend; I’ve withheld the name of his city by request: A couple of personal stories on the Occupy “movement”: My Father in Law works for the County Works Department as an engineer for public transportation. His office building is in downtown and shares space with the county courthouse.  This is what people decided to […]

From a friend; I’ve withheld the name of his city by request:

A couple of personal stories on the Occupy “movement”: My Father in Law works for the County Works Department as an engineer for public transportation. His office building is in downtown and shares space with the county courthouse.  This is what people decided to occupy.
Though the occupiers were not many in number, their presence proved to be a problem for the trendy shopping neighborhood they inhabited.  They caused traffic issues. And of course, there were issues of hygiene. So the occupiers cried out that the County should supply them with Porta-Potties.  For free. From the County Works.  The same folks they were occupying.
This just illustrates that the occupiers lost sight of what they were supposed to be occupying.  In what thoughtful reality is “Wall Street” in New York the same as the County Works and Courthouse in Small-Town America?  My Father in Law is not the 1%.  The fact of the matter is that — inasmuch as the occupiers thought at all about what they were doing — they saw Wall Street and Government (of all kinds) as one and the same.  While one might be able to make this case for certain sections of the federal government (like regulatory departments) this is certainly not true about county government.  What percentage of Americans work for county government? I’m sure it is more than one.
The Porta-Potty bit reminds me of the artists who want the state, funded mostly by middle-class taxpayers, to give them grants to denounce the worldviews of the middle-class taxpayers.
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