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.

From The Papers: An Amateur's Reactions To Other Amateurs' Reactions; Or, Trawling The Letters Page

I've often wondered about the sort of people who write letters to the editor, myself being one of them from time to time. There is a spectrum, of course, from liberal to conservative, articulate to incoherent, thoughtful to screeching. In today's Santa Cruz Sentinel, however, the four letters seem to come from the same cross-section of humanity, all with the same target, the Occupy Santa Cruz movement.

The letters range from the irritated to the outright hostile, bordering on sanctimonious. As with many letters to the editor, I think every individual letter speaks more to the individual writer than the issue being addressed. These letters feel somewhat selfish, like each person, rather than addressing a solution for the larger issues raised by the Occupy Santa Cruz movement, is simply trying to vent their own visceral reactions and collect their 15 minutes of fame.

My harvesting of their letters as fodder for this blog is in no way the same thing. I mean it.

So the Occupy movement is certainly a controversial one. In the main, I sympathize with the causes associated therein, such as reforming Wall Street and the banking/lending processes that put so many people in bad situations, and the need to re-examine our economic practices that create such disparity in terms of wealth in this country. Such an examination should, of course, be taken from the microscopic--so to speak--to the macroscopic to view how the US operates in the global economy. There are, however, a few problems that have emerged during the Occupy phenomenon, which have distorted the message and allowed critics traction. For instance, there have been issues with violence and anarchy attaching themselves to what should be a peaceful assembly. And in Santa Cruz, for example, there is controversy over the fact that some individuals, ostensibly independent of but in sympathy with Occupy Santa Cruz, took over an empty building that used to house a bank.

Let's look at the letters, for a snapshot of how some local people view the movement. I'll summarize and offer my thoughts on each letter. Bear in mind, these are my subjective responses to the letters.

One gentleman suggests that protesters go to the residence of the person they have a problem with and block their street and mess up their area, and not the parks. First of all, I'm not sure if the person is serious or not, but there is no one residence, and no one person for the protesters to focus on. They are protesting an overarching issue in society, which requires a public venue for their right to assemble and express their feelings. Here we run into the question of public property, and whether an Occupy movement is impinging on the rights of others to use that public property by staying there for an extended period. That is always a grey area, and I don't have an answer, but I would tend to argue for the rights of people to peacefully assemble in a public area without restriction, until health and safety issues develop. The trouble is, the longer they stay there, the more likely issues are likely to occur, from homeless merging with the campers, to the natural flaring of tempers and other conflict. My perception of Occupy Santa Cruz is that it has been fairly well managed and controlled, both by the protesters and the city.

The gentleman also makes another claim that just makes no sense to me. He says the college students at UCSC who occupied a building on campus should not pay tuition and not attend any classes for 90 days. I don't understand his point on this one, saying that would accomplish something other than chaos. If they protest the higher tuition rates, certainly not paying is one option, although in the present system, higher education does require resources, and students should pay for their fair share if they are going to partake of those resources. But my understanding of the UCSC protest was that it related more to the pepper-spraying at UC Davis than anything else. This confusion perhaps speaks to the somewhat unfocused nature of the protest; or maybe it argues against the presence of a single movement, but rather many separate, related but independent protests.

Another letter writer complains about a photo of the UCSC police chief interacting in a jovial fashion. Apparently the letter writer would prefer the police take a hardline with student occupiers. Apparently the letter writer considers an act of civil disobedience to be an unforgivable crime. Never mind that the building being occupied was a university building, and therefore public, funded by the public and by tuition. Do the students have a legitimate right to block entry to a building, to deny workers entry? Maybe or maybe not, but it would not be as black and white an issue as this letter-writer suggests. It is a sensitive issue, especially in light of the outrageous pepper-spraying at UC Davis, so I say that any effort to find a harmonious resolution between the police and the protesters is to be commended.

Another writer sneeringly advised the "Occupiers" to walk around the Earth in five years, to broaden their focus and "'Occupy' a progressive place, the next turf you step to as you travel." First of all, you can't walk around the Earth. There are all these vast bodies of water that get in the way. You might have heard of them. There's one right next door. Second, I find it interesting that he says they should go to a progressive place, as if Santa Cruz were not progressive. I haven't lived here long enough to form a conclusion, but my impression has always been that it is progressive, as measured by the number of men who feel free to play the bongos while overlooking the ocean.

The point that really raised my eyebrows and hackles about this letter, though, was that the man said the Occupiers should realize that search for "fairness" is childish, because it doesn't exist, 'never has, never will.' He seems to imply that means that we shouldn't make an effort to make things more fair. That seems the more childish attitude to me, either from someone who has benefited from unfair actions, or by someone who is so insecure and paranoid that they want to deny any possibility of making things more equitable.

The last letter is the most complex for my reaction. A man says that all the persons who are illegally inside the otherwise empty bank building should be arrested for breaking and entering, conspiracy, and burglary. He says if convicted, they should lose their 'right to vote.' Why he put 'right to vote' in quotation marks is beyond me, but it makes him look like a jerk. Which he probably is.

He is right that the people who broke into the building should be responsible for cleaning up any damage they did. In this case, a empty building is not necessarily a public space, in the sense that a park is public. The question of the inherent right to private property is far too complex for me to argue over, so I won't do so, but I would say that the letter writer is overreacting. The building is empty; what is the property owner doing with the building that makes it so much more valuable empty than it would be as a symbol of political expression? Another question would be if this was a bank branch for one of the institutions that received a bailout by taxpayer money. Bailouts mean that the taxpayers have a stake in the institution until the taxpayer money is repaid in full. Furthermore, losing the right to vote over utilizing the right to free speech and freedom of expression seems overly harsh. A visceral reaction, rather than an objective reaction.

To be fair to all these letter writers, they did not hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. Internet postings can be unbelievably venomous, such as those of the brave, good people who posted comments about wanting Barney Frank to die of AIDS; and that was on a message board at SI.com, which should be about sports and fun and games. That was almost enough to make me give up liking sports, just because sports would be guilty of association with some pretty awful people.