After a somewhat heated Twitter exchange that I didn't intend to make heated with a friend over the evacuation of Zuccotti Park, I realized there is just a lot that I don't know. It's also very hard to debate on Twitter, since you don't get a lot of characters to use, so what you learn back from someone else is a sad little snippet of their thoughts as well.
Anyway, if a "park", in this instance a stone/marble/concrete seating area, is privately owned but intended for public use, what rights do the people who use it have? Do they have the right to erect tents? I honestly don't know. I know if someone pitched a tent on my property they better damn well have cleared it with me ahead of time, or I too would kick them out in the middle of the night when they were tired and less likely to offer resistance, especially if they overstayed their welcome and I was about to be sued by business owners over lost revenue. And no, I wouldn't want to let them alert the media and make a circus out of it either.
I wouldn't, however, use pepper spray, but who am I to criticize since I wasn't there, and I don't know what really happened. And I wouldn't be evicting hundreds of people from my land. Was Zuccotti Park peacefully evacuated? Obviously not since pepper spray was involved. It wasn't violent on the scale that some of the Occupy protests have been though. It seems like it was done fairly quickly, but I haven't really paid enough attention to the after-stories to know for sure. There ARE some things I do know:
1) This "park" used to be called Liberty Plaza pre-9/11. People ate lunch there, played chess there, and generally loitered there. There is no grass. There are no bathroom facilities.
2) Brookfield Properties owns Zuccotti Park, not New York City
3) Zuccotti Park is not on Wall Street
4) Many of the "Wall Street" firms that people are protesting are not located downtown
5) NYC has a larger population than some states. The mayor of NYC therefore is a powerful person.
6) The last I knew, the mayor's salary was $1. He is a billionaire and doesn't need the city's money, so he only takes the token $1.
7) A church wouldn't let the protestors sleep on its property either, but people don't seem as upset over it
So teach me some of things I don't know. Seriously. I would like to hear.
