Occupy Starts, Stops with Trash

By John Ransom
Friday, December 02, 2011

30 tons of leftover waste as a monument seems fitting somehow for a protest movement made up of the intellectual trash-bin of the country’s- the world's?- left wing. Europe is forcing balanced budgets, so one has to wonder how long the FDR-Keynesian crowd can pretend to be anything other than an historical curiosity.

When police evicted the protesters from in and around city hall in LA, hazmat teams found personal items that “astonished city workers,” according to the LA Times.

The protesters left “books and CDs, luggage and boom boxes, mattresses and dining chairs, cellphones, electric razors, a small red guitar with its neck snapped –- all surrounded by dozens of collapsed and empty tents.”

Hazmat teams had to come in to clean up the mess. Imagine dozens of Carl Spacklers squeegee-ing out the grounds of LA’s city hall.

And thus, the contrast between the Tea Party protesters and the Occupiers is now complete.

Good going to all those media sophisticates who tried to tell us that the Occupy movement was the left’s mirror image of the Tea Party.

Forget the double-standard that the media has applied to the two movements when they reported on them. The double standard just makes the media look more foolish in the end.

And you know the end is near for any political movement when TB breaks out amongst people freely-associating for political purposes- and smoking a little weed.

Pot kind of gives a different context to the idea of a grassroots movement.

Don’t get me wrong. There are Tea Partiers, who, uh, party. But outside of the Paulites, they don’t make partying part of the officially sanctioned activities.

The Tea Party folks would have just brought some sort of cheese-covered casseroles and maybe some bottled water and s’mores to a rally- and then gone home a few hours later to spend time with their families.

Occupiers brought communicable diseases.

Now that’s a type of “communism” in action; hope you can believe in.

The great thing about the mainstream media is that the coffin nails which are sealing up the pine box surrounding them are being fashioned everyday by themselves.

They haven’t made a right call since they asked John Kerry to report for duty in his yachting cap and ascot.

Give them this though: The Occupiers' trash shows that they apparently are sincere when they trash the materialism of the lower, middle and upper classes. But it’s easy to discard material things in a park in LA when your first demands are that someone else pay for those things in the first place.

Easy come is easy go when a third party pays the tab.

Still, the urban cognoscenti from New York Magazine has noted the much fairer way that NYPD treated trash the Occupiers left behind when kicked out of Zuccotti Park.

“By contrast, when the OWS protesters at Zuccotti Park were unceremoniously evicted,” whines NYMag, “the debris was taken to a sanitation facility at West 57th Street where protesters with ‘proper ID’ could recover their belongings once waste was sorted from personal property. Why weren't the L.A. protesters afforded the same opportunity?”

They are so right: It’s just not fair.

I say make the Occupiers pick up and sort their own trash next time.