Relative Liberty

In the time since New York police evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park--formerly known as Liberty Park Plaza--metal barricades have been erected around the site, restricting access and forcing entrants to pass through checkpoints.

I don't know about you, but I just love passing through "checkpoints" to get to a public space. That makes me feel relaxed and happy; checkpoints make me think of sugar plums and fairies.

The ACLU is currently suing for removal of the barricades. This serves as a fine distillation of one of the central dilemmas for me in considering the Occupy Movement, specifically the encampments.

Public space is public space, and the right to assemble and the right to free speech should be inviolable. On the other hand, when you have a teeming encampment of people in a public park, that is going to discourage quite a few other members of the public from taking advantage of the public space. Individual rights to assemble and speak out are always limited by the right of other individuals not to be harmed or have their own rights unduly restricted.

In the case of Zuccotti Park, the question of public space is complicated by the fact that it is technically a "Privately Owned Public Space." In other words, it is property owned by private interests, not the city, and it is treated as a public space in exchange for other zoning incentives. This particular park was created in 1968 by United States Steel. The current owners, prior to the evacuation of protestors, said that the lingering presence of campers posed sanitary hazards. The protestors volunteered to clean it up themselves, but that was never really going to satisfy anyone in the administration, I wouldn't think. It could be that the sanitation question was simply a convenient and plausible excuse for disassembling the assembly.

In any case, it is telling that people exercising their right to assemble and their right to free speech triggered the construction of barricades to limit access to the space. How fitting it is that the park is no longer called Liberty Park Plaza--the name was changed to honor the chairman of the current owners of the property. I find that morbidly amusing.

Regardless of whether or not the Occupy movement has a right to monopolize public--or quasi-public--space by camping there, I think common sense should be used instead of metal barricades. If you are going to say that the Occupy protestors are ruining it for everyone and preventing others from using the space, you can't turn around and fence off the space. That doesn't work from an ethical standpoint.

How about letting groups pay for a permit to utilize the space? The money--which would need a rigorously transparent accounting process--could be used to maintain the space and provide proper facilities and maintenance. Or maybe make a part of the permit price serve as a deposit; that would encourage the protestors to rigorously self-police and attend to any disruptive elements.

Or maybe it is time for the Occupy movement to turn its attention to politics, like the Tea Party. Look to promote candidates for office to express your ideas through political channels, although this does not mean that protests should be stopped entirely. Any channel to bring attention to inequality should be utilized to the fullest. You just have to figure out when one channel is no longer useful, or when you start to harm your cause by persisting in the same actions with the same results over and over, especially when you start to lose the sympathy of the public.